Colonialism Competition Makira PDF

This article was downloaded by: [188.85.109.
180]
On: 24 August 2014, At: 01:14
Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered
office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
History and Anthropology

Publication details, including instructions for authors and
subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ghan20
The Matter of Makira: Colonialism,

Competition, and the Production of
Gendered Peoples in Contemporary
Solomon Islands and Medieval Britain
Michael W. Scott
Published online: 21 Feb 2012.
To cite this article: Michael W. Scott (2012) The Matter of Makira: Colonialism, Competition, and
the Production of Gendered Peoples in Contemporary Solomon Islands and Medieval Britain, History
and Anthropology, 23:1, 115-148, DOI: 10.1080/02757206.2012.649276
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2012.649276
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE
Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the
“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,
our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to
the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions
and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,
and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content
should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources
of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,
proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or
howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising
out of the use of the Content.
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any
substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,
systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &
Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-
and-conditions
History and Anthropology,
Vol. 23, No. 1, March 2012, pp. 115 – 148
The Matter of Makira: Colonialism,

Competition, and the Production of
Gendered Peoples in Contemporary
Solomon Islands and Medieval Britain
Downloaded by [188.85.109.180] at 01:14 24 August 2014
Michael W. Scott
Since civil tension disrupted Solomon Islands between 1998 and 2003, the Arosi of Makira
have elaborated discourses according to which their island contains a secret and preterna-
turally powerful subterranean army base. These discourses have clear antecedents in
Maasina Rule, a post-World War II socio-political movement sometimes analysed as a
“cargo cult”. Offering an alternative interpretation, I compare Arosi discourses about
the Makiran underground to the Matter of Britain as represented in Geoffrey of Mon-
mouth’s History of the Kings of Britain (completed c. 1138). I argue that both sets of dis-
courses arise from the dynamics of mutually precipitating communities mythologizing
themselves and each other in terms of the analogous oppositions colonizer is to colonized
as allochthon is to autochthon as male is to female. This comparison, I conclude, rec-
ommends the medieval European phenomenon of a “matter” as a productive model for
understanding contemporary ethnogenetic myth-making in and beyond Melanesia.
Keywords: Ethnogenesis; Gender; Colonialism; Geoffrey of Monmouth; Solomon Islands
‘The Welsh habit of revolt,’ said an English chronicler in 1316 with the weariness of a dis-
trict commissioner reporting on recalcitrant natives, ‘is a long-standing madness. . . .
This is the reason. The Welsh, formerly called the Britons, were once noble crowned
over the whole realm of England; but they were expelled by the Saxons and lost both
name and kingdom. . . . But from the sayings of the prophet Merlin they still hope to
recover England. Hence it is that they frequently rebel.’ (Davies 2000: 46, translating
from Vita Edwardi Secundi [Denholm-Young 1957: 69])
Correspondence to: Michael W. Scott, Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics and Political
Science, Houghton Street, London, WC2A 2AE, UK. Email: m.w.scott@lse.ac.uk
ISSN 0275-7206 print/1477-2612 online/12/010115–34 # 2012 Taylor & Francis

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2012.649276
116 M. W. Scott
Prologue: The History of a Melanesian Mystery

In 2003 I returned for six weeks to the site of my doctoral research in the Pacific
nation-state of Solomon Islands, a former British Protectorate independent since
1978 (see Map 1). Visiting again among the Arosi at the northwest end of the
island of Makira, I encountered ideas and discourses that were new to me and that
seemed to be occasioned by a period of civil unrest now known as the “ethnic
tension”. Between 1998 and 2003, Solomon Islands suffered conflict and coup,
mostly in and around Honiara, the national capital on Guadalcanal, the island
immediately west of Makira. At the centre of this multi-causal crisis were disputes
between those who see themselves as customary land owners on Guadalcanal and
those they see as usurpers—especially economic migrants from the island of
Malaita. These disputes escalated into armed skirmishes between insurgent Guadalca-
nal militias bent on expelling Malaitans and Malaitan militias seeking control of the
country in the name of self-defence. In 2003 the Australian government—having pre-

viously declined several requests from Solomon Islands for assistance—coordinated
the international Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) in an
effort to stabilize what, following the Bali nightclub bombing of 2002, it saw as a
“failed state” vulnerable to terrorist infiltration (Bennett 2002; Dinnen 2002; Fraenkel
2004; Kabutaulaka 2001, 2005; Moore 2004, 2007). RAMSI remains, at the time of this
writing, an ongoing intervention.
Map 1. West, central, and southeast Solomon Islands. Map by Mina Moshkeri Upton.
History and Anthropology 117
Referencing this turmoil, Arosi were eager to tell me that they had witnessed or
heard rumours about a variety of anomalous phenomena during the tension. There
had been sightings of unusual sea craft, such as a large ship bearing the English
name “Motherland”, vessels that suddenly appeared and disappeared, and submarines
said to be camouflaged as whales or porpoises. People also reported strange offshore
and undersea lights, and there was speculation that a mysterious force was causing a
high incidence of marine mammal beachings. Another talking point was alleged
glimpses of unfamiliar people—chiefly white, but also sometimes black—wearing
military fatigues and seen up in the bush or out on inaccessible coastal cliffs. But
people were most interested and perplexed by the inexplicable and persistent appear-
ance of unidentifiable aircraft. I was told that “everyone saw” some kind of nearly
noiseless low-flying object with a pulsing light that, at the height of the tension,
passed erratically over Makira almost nightly. Accounts of how many and what
kinds of aircraft were seen differed, however. Some people described a small airplane
with a visible pilot; others conjectured that they were seeing unmanned drones.1
Attempts to account for these phenomena both referenced and fed into the pro-
duction of a local legend—the mystery of the Makiran underground, connoted
immediately throughout Arosi by the terms bahai nai ano (under the ground) or
gao nai ano (below the ground). These terms refer to a complex tissue of stories
and speculations that there might be a secret and extraordinary military base inside
Makira. Without necessarily accepting such stories as true, many people were familiar
with discourses that interpreted the strange goings-on during the tension as manifes-
tations of an underground army, the purpose of which is to protect Makira from the
type of encroachment by outsiders—especially Malaitans—said to be responsible for
the troubles on Guadalcanal.
My consultants seemed to imagine this army as comprising personnel from diverse
parts of the world, but whites—especially white Americans—were most prominent in
their accounts. People also suggested that this is no ordinary human army acting alone.
It derives its power and technology, they said, from beings called kakamora, dwarf-like
creatures well known in Arosi folklore as the original autochthons of Makira depicted
as living in caves and sinkholes and possessing supernormal abilities (Fox 1924). Now,
in the new lore of the underground, these kakamora are not only the source of the
army’s extraordinary capabilities, they are also the custodians of a lost true Makiran
language and ancestral way of living typically referred to as kastom (Solomon
Islands Pijin) or ringeringe (Arosi). Additionally, I heard claims that Solomon
S. Mamaloni (1943–2000), an Arosi-born three-times Solomon Islands Prime Minis-
ter, is associated with the underground army. According to these claims, Mamaloni
had been in touch with the army while in power and did not really die in 2000, but
is working covertly with the underground, preparing it to restore true Makiran
kastom and lead Makira to federal or independent statehood, prosperity, and regional
dominance.
From my previous work with Arosi, I recognized that these discourses constituted
updated transformations of ideas at least as old as Maasina Rule, a socio-political
movement that began in the ‘Are‘are region of Malaita and flourished in the central
118 M. W. Scott
and southeast Solomons between the mid 1940s and early 1950s.2 The original name of
the movement was probably Maasina Ruru, a phrase that in the ‘Are‘are language
could be translated as “brotherhood cooperation” (Allan 1950: 27; Keesing 1978: 49;
Laracy 1983: 19 –20; Naitoro 1993: 83 n. 23). This name, although not semantically
transparent to some participants—including Arosi—aptly describes what was a
regionally plural but also unifying initiative. As well as mobilizing communities to
build amalgamated villages, work communal gardens, and revive traditional knowl-
edge and practices, the movement also demanded civil rights, higher wages, edu-
cational opportunities, development, and legal recognition of indigenous leadership
and customs. In Arosi, Maasina Rule involved these aspects of a common agenda,
but adaptations of the movement also entailed rumours that American servicemen sta-
tioned in the region during or shortly after World War II had secretly hollowed out
Makira and built a subterranean town full of modern manufactured goods with the
intention of assisting Islanders to develop and govern themselves.

These Arosi understandings of Maasina Rule were not without experiential foun-
dation. A major stimulus to the development of Maasina Rule was the wartime
context that brought Solomon Islanders together with US military personnel on Gua-
dalcanal. There, members of the Solomon Islands Labour Corps came to regard Amer-
icans as—in contrast with the British—fraternal and openhanded (Fifi‘i 1989: 45–59;
White et al. 1988). The camaraderie and largesse of American servicemen, on the one
hand, and the immensity of the American war machine, on the other, suggested to
Islanders new possibilities for better conditions in relationship to whites and fostered
hopes that America would support them with material aid or even military interven-
tion. After the war, as Islanders took up Maasina Rule, rumours and claims sometimes
emerged according to which Americans were coming with the assistance required to
realize the aims of the movement. Owing to these kinds of hopes, some commentators
have analysed Maasina Rule with reference to the “cargo cult” label or in terms of
“cargo” expectations (e.g. Allan 1950, 1951; Cochrane 1970; Davies 1980; Fraenkel
2004: 30; Herlihy 2003; Kaima 1991).3
The less widespread idea that Americans might already be present in the islands,
hiding with the desired supplies underground, may also have been informed by
Islanders’ wartime experiences. Prior to their departure, US forces liquidated
“58,831 measurement tons” of surplus stock, which “was burned, buried, or
dumped at sea” (Stauffer 1956: 324; cf. Bennett 2009: 182–188; Lindstrom & White
1990: 98). A now deceased Arosi man, who had served in the Labour Corps on Gua-
dalcanal, told me he had seen the Americans construct many large underground build-
ings, fill them with vast amounts of equipment, and cover them with logs and soil (cf.
Ngwadili et al. 1988: 213). “I think they were a preparation, not just disposal”, he said.
Another consultant, who had been an adolescent at the time, averred that during
Maasina Rule “everyone knew about this”. Although few Americans were present on
Makira, such knowledge, in combination with a conviction that the US must have
an intended use for these materials, appears to have contributed to the idea that
Makira too might be the site of such an underground preparation for imminent devel-
opment. And Arosi were evidently not alone in envisioning such possibilities. On
Santa Isabel—and perhaps elsewhere—Maasina Rule included “speculation about the

actual presence of American troops on the island—in mountainous bush regions, on
the uninhabited portions of St. George Island, or even underground” (White 1978:
250; cf. Allan 1950: 60).
In the early 1990s, most Arosi had disparaged Maasina Rule as having been a naı̈ve
and misguided endeavour. By 2003, some appeared willing to entertain a providential
view of history that equated Maasina Rule with the Old Testament as a set of promises
and the imminent future with the New Testament as the fulfilment of those promises
(Scott 2011: 212–214). In 2003, however, the promise that these Arosi hoped might be
fulfilled with help from underground was no longer a promise of greater autonomy or
independence vis-à-vis a colonial regime, but a promise of federal statehood within—
even secession from—a young nation-state. With a view to collecting further data
about these ideas and their implications for how Arosi experience being Makiran
within the nation-state, I returned to Solomon Islands in 2006 for seven months of
village-based research in Arosi and two months of urban and archival research
divided between Honiara and the Makira/Ulawa provincial centre of Kirakira. What
I accumulated is a plethora of diversely positioned—sometimes detailed, sometimes
sketchy; sometimes earnest, sometimes joking; sometimes convinced, sometimes scep-
tical; sometimes agnostic, but most often just confessedly perplexed—complex and
competing discourses about the Makiran underground.
The Makiran Underground as Matter-Making

Readers familiar with the literature on so-called “cargo cults” in Melanesia will recog-
nize elements from a well-known repertoire: an underground realm full of modern
infrastructure and technology controlled by autochthonous powers of the land;
claims that certain people have been in communication with this realm; Americans
as ancestor-like liberators bringing development; and expectations of imminent trans-
formation from poverty to prosperity. By virtue of being such a convenient heuristic
for the comparative aggregation of data, however, this instant recognition signals an
anthropological dilemma. It would be naı̈ve to analyse Arosi discourses about the
Makiran underground without reference to the archive of ethnography categorized
under the rubric “cargo cult”. But important critiques have brought the analytical
merit of this category seriously into question.
It has been argued, for example, that anthropologists should eschew “cargo” and
“cargo cult” as analytical terms—or write them “under erasure” (Hermann 2004:
36–41)—because these terms reproduce the pejorative and dominating intentions
with which colonial authorities used them to delegitimize Melanesians whose
alleged expectations of spontaneously arriving goods disturbed them as ungovernable
“madness”. Even when attempts are made to deconstruct these terms by showing how
the phenomena they describe are analogous to other forms of economic, political, or
religious processes in Melanesian contexts (e.g. Biersack 1996; McDowell 1988), these
terms, some critics suggest, continue to stigmatize Melanesians. They essentialize Mel-
anesians as “cargoistic”, as preoccupied in an implicitly base way with gross materiality
120 M. W. Scott
(Lindstrom 1993: 41 –54). Detecting a Western embarrassment at unvarnished covet-
ousness in both the colonial aversion to cargo culting and anthropological attempts to
explain it away, Lindstrom (1993) has contended that it is Western writers, not Mel-
anesians, who are obsessed with materiality, projecting their insatiable desires onto
Melanesians. Others have been concerned that “cargo” and “cargo cult” are constructs
that represent Melanesians as irrational—as limited to an implicitly lower mentality
capable of figuring profound moral and metaphysical truths through mythopoesis
and mimesis but resistant to persuasion by the formal and physical truths evident
to an implicitly higher Western mentality (cf. Dalton 2000).
Given these potentially paralysing critiques, how then should anthropologists who
encounter such data describe and share knowledge about them? I would not rec-
ommend the wholesale jettisoning of the analytical language of “cargo cult”. Dalton
(2004: 192) makes an arresting point when he writes that “[e]liminating the term is
not so unlike making the activity it denotes illegal”. Neither do I wish to reproduce
that language without subjecting it to analytical reconstruction—a project that lies
beyond the scope of the present study. What I seek to explore in this article is the pro-
posal that Arosi discourses about the Makiran underground—considered as a hetero-
geneous congeries of folkloric traditions, kastom stories, rumours, eyewitness claims,
accounts of uncanny encounters or abductions, memories, writings, prophecies, idio-
syncratic speculations, and experiences of perplexity and wonder—may productively
be compared to the medieval European phenomenon of a “matter”. This comparison is
not an attempt at blanket relexification of “cargo cult” as matter-making. It is a
method for recognizing some “cargoistic” discourses as powerful elements in the
semiotic processes of ethnogenesis.
The first known reference to a “matter” stands near the beginning of a narrative
poem, La Chanson des Saisnes (Song of the Saxons), by the Old French poet Jean
Bodel (1165–1210):
N’en sont que trois materes a nul home vivant:
De France et de Bretaigne et de Rome la grant. (1989: 2; cf. 1992: 15)
There are but three matters known to every estate,

Those of France and of Britain and of Rome the great.
(trans. K. L. Ovist and M. W. Scott)
With these lines Bodel either innovated or formalized the notion of a matter as an open-
ended cycle of tales, the unifying protagonist of which is more a place than a person. The
Matter of Rome is shorthand for the myths, legends, and history contained in classical
literature, understood as a storehouse of worthy themes for new songs, plays, and
romances. The Matter of France pertains mainly to the adventures of the soldiers of
Charlemagne in their defence of Frankish territory from Saracen invasion. And the
Matter of Britain centres around the equally fertile and ongoing Arthurian saga of con-
flict over the sovereignty and identity of the “Atlantic archipelago”.4
Such matters exemplify what political historian Anthony D. Smith (2003: 7)
describes as the “cultural resources that provide sacred foundations for the sense of
national identity”. They are—not the evolutionary precursors to so-called national
epics—but the prolific, unsorted, unreconciled, living prima materia—both written

and oral—out of which such epics have sometimes been selected, arranged, and
edited. Above all, matters are romances of place.5 As loosely cohering tales and tra-
ditions, they are truly nebulous, consisting of undelimited tangents spinning off
from and producing sacred centres, holy lands—motherlands and fatherlands—
emotion-laden landscapes shaped by marvellous deeds and events. The discourses I
documented about the Makiran underground may, I suggest, be generating such a
matter. Like medieval matters, they are anything but a closed monological system;
they are polyphonic utterances that are producing the Makiran underground as an
unfinished dialogic complex.6 Collectively they are generating a legendary mystified
Makira, a host of symbols and icons of Makira, and a sense of what it means to be
Makiran, experienced in affective response to those symbols and icons.
Thus loosely defined, a matter resembles in some respects what Burridge (1960) in
his classic study Mambu called a “myth-dream”. By this term Burridge meant an ara-
tional collective mood, “a community day-dream” (1960: 148) without social form. It
requires, he thought, a charismatic leader to “intellectualize” (1960: 267) aspects of the
myth-dream, to abstract and crystallize it in ways that may mobilize a community
around it. Part of my intent, however, in describing Arosi discourses about the
Makiran underground as matter-making is to suggest that the production of such dis-
courses always proceeds dialogically via affect-laden thoughts that evoke thoughtful
feelings, regardless of the presence or absence of a charismatic leader or the level of
literacy involved. Such discourses are always already what Burridge identified as the
needed outcome of intellectualization, namely, “durable” (1960: 32) forms in their
own right, replete with diverse potentialities for new social and cultural expressions.
My aim, additionally, in comparing Arosi discourses about the Makiran under-
ground to the European tradition of matter-making is to emphasize that these dis-
courses develop, not just any matter, but the very specific matter of the relationship
between a place and its inhabitants as a unity of being. And I seek to highlight that
such matters are not isolates, but come into being alongside other dialogically
constructed matters. What I will call the Matter of Makira is part of a complex set
of matters and counter-matters, a dialogue among dialogues, in the context of a
de-colonized nation-state undergoing internal processes of ethnogenesis.
With this focus on ethnogenesis, my project again revisits earlier work. Anthropol-
ogists of Melanesia have often interpreted phenomena similar to Arosi talk about the
Makiran underground as expressive and productive of “new-found unity” (Worsley
1968: 228), even proto-nationalism (Guiart 1951; Lawrence 1954, 1964: Chapter
IX). They have analysed such discourses and the movements with which they were
sometimes associated as contributing to the “formation of national groupings” that
might eventuate in the “political units of the region” (Worsley 1968: 254–255).
In turning to the concept of matter-making, I pick up this narrative of proto-
nationalism in its post-decolonization phase. To paraphrase and update Worsley
(1968: 254), I argue that what we are witnessing in Solomon Islands is the formation
of reciprocally negotiated ethnicized identities in a recently bounded, internally plural
independent nation-state (cf. Allen 2009; Guidieri & Pellizzi 1988; Scales 2007; White
122 M. W. Scott
2001). But I am also suggesting that, contra Worsley (1968), the development of these
co-conditioning identities is not a process through which Melanesians are discarding
myth, ritual, and tradition in favour of secularized politics (cf. Lattas 1998: xxix–xxx).
The ethnography of post-independence Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu as well con-
tinues to document comparable phenomena (e.g. Bell 2006; Clark 1997; Eves 2003;
Iteanu & Kapon 2001; Jebens 2010; Lattas 1998; Tabani 2005). The development of
shared social and cultural forms—such as national pijins, educational systems, and
party politics—has not superseded the mythic and often millenarian production of
regional communities in these contexts. And it may be that some, though undoubtedly
not all, of these data could productively be understood as matter and counter-matter-
making. My proposal, therefore, is to explore the serviceability of the concept of a
matter for developing fresh ways of thinking about and representing these enduring
phenomena both in and beyond Melanesia.
To this end, I undertake two main tasks. First, I present an analytical summary of the
striking similarities between the content of Arosi discourses about the underground
and one of the three great European matters: the Matter of Britain in its earliest sus-
tained literary version, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s (c. 1100–1155) History of the Kings of
Britain (Historia Regum Britanniae) completed around the year 1138. Second, I
attempt to account for these similarities as the outcomes of two instructively similar
historical situations.7 Just as Burridge (1960: 141) argued that the movements he
studied in colonial New Guinea emerged “within a total relationship structure” he
called “the triangle”, I argue that both the Matter of Britain and the Matter of
Makira likewise emerge within such a triangular structure, but one comprising a
different set of terms. Whereas Burridge identified tensions among Melanesians, colo-
nial officials, and European missionaries as generative of myth-dreams and move-
ments, I identify tensions between two locally co-producing communities and their
relations with a distant, more empowered, and potentially vindicating third party as
generative of the meta-dialogue of matter and counter-matter-making. And whereas
Burridge (1960: 254–283) argued that myth-dreams and movements aspire to trans-
late division into unity, I argue that matters often aspire to assert difference as
gendered hierarchy. I show how the Matter of Britain and the Matter of Makira,
each in its own colonially configured context, arises from the dynamics of mutually
precipitating communities mythologizing themselves and each other in terms of the
analogous oppositions colonizer is to colonized as allochthon is to autochthon as
male is to female. This comparison, I conclude, recommends matter-making as a
portable European concept useful for understanding the current forms and future
potentialities of such discourses as aesthetically powerful regional politics and politi-
cally charged aesthetic productions.
The Matter of Britain

In this section I offer an anthropologist’s reading of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of
the Kings of Britain, the version of the Matter of Britain that is arguably the centre of
gravity that first gave this matter complex coherence and around which innumerable
versions, cycles, and sub-cycles continue to accumulate. Little is known about the life
of Geoffrey of Monmouth. He appears to have stood geographically, linguistically, and
socially at the nexus of the three peoples his history seeks to amalgamate: Normans,
Bretons, and the Welsh. Born in Monmouth in the Welsh borderlands—possibly of
Breton descent on his father’s side—Geoffrey spent his productive years at Oxford
where he associated with and won the patronage of the Anglo-Norman elite.8 In
this context, as I discuss in a later section, Geoffrey wrote his history with a political
motive, but he is not “an author” in the “modern” or Romantic sense of an original
autonomous creator.9 Rather, he is a positioned redactor of diverse traditions pre-
existing in a plurality of forms, genres, and languages: oral and written; narrative
and genealogical; poetic and toponymic; Breton, Welsh, and Latin (Higham 2002:
222–223). While Geoffrey crafts a unified narrative out of this diversity, his account
does not shut down the productivity of what it omits or modifies; it remains in dia-
logue with its antecedents and generative of countless alternatives and marginal devel-
opments in which a multitude of variants is always implied and accruing. I take
Geoffrey as my chief interlocutor, not because his text is the whole of the matter,
but because it is always at the heart of the matter and in order to give my comparison
its own degree of coherence. But the comparison, it should be noted, could be taken
further, as Makiran discourses about the underground resonate with elements of the
Matter of Britain beyond those found in Geoffrey’s history.10
While engaged with historical and critical scholarship on Geoffrey, my reading of his
text is more generally informed by theoretical models developed in the study of very
different historical and cultural contexts and, to my knowledge, not previously
invoked in the study of The History of the Kings of Britain. From the work of Marshall
Sahlins (1985: 73–103; 1992), I take the insight that the paradigm of the stranger-king
is a culturally widespread and inherently diachronic structure through which a colo-
nizing population can instantiate both a figuratively masculine position vis-à-vis a
colonized land and its people and a figuratively feminine position vis-à-vis subsequent
colonizers. From the work of Louis Dumont (1980: 239–245), I borrow as applicable
to this context the concept of hierarchy as “the encompassing of the contrary” (1980:
239). By this phrase Dumont referred to a model of relative value according to which
two seemingly equivalent complementary opposites are also an asymmetrical pair in
which one is simultaneously itself and the dyad as a whole, thus hierarchically encom-
passing the other. And drawing on the work of James J. Fox (1994, 2008), I extend his
observation that, while “[a]n order of precedence can be a hierarchy” (1994: 106) in
the Dumontian sense, it can also be used to contest other hierarchies. Although
Fox’s treatment of precedence is grounded in data from Austronesian-speaking
societies, there is, as he notes, “nothing inherent in the notion of precedence itself
that would confine it to the study of these societies” (1994: 96). Accordingly, I
explore here how Geoffrey uses kinship and chronology to construct orders of pre-
cedence between senior versus junior lines of descent and first-comers versus late-
comers in order to re-position and subordinate the hierarchy implicit in the gendered
asymmetry of colonizer and colonized.
124 M. W. Scott
Geoffrey uses kinship, temporal and locative precedence, and gender to construct
relations of difference, identity, and hierarchy in “a complex interaction of valent
oppositions” (Fox 1994: 98). He coordinates these variables, I suggest, to provide
the people he calls the Britons with strategies for overcoming the feminizing conse-
quences of both static isolation and subordinating invasion. By these means he rep-
resents successive waves of newcomers to Britain less as stranger-kings than long-
lost kin who bring with them a reinvigorating masculinity necessary to restore the
Britons to identity with their island. At the same time he implies that, although the
newcomers possess an ascendant masculinity, they are subordinate to the Britons in
relation to whom they are a late-arriving junior branch of a common descent category.
Privileging the precedence of the Britons in the island and their seniority within the
greater family, Geoffrey narrates as though, first the Romans, and then the
Romano-Britons of Brittany were encompassed by the insular Britons in a revitalized
synthesis that furthermore subordinated the Saxons.

Near the beginning of his work, Geoffrey writes:
In latter days, five peoples have inhabited the island: the Normans, the Britons, the
Saxons, the Picts, and the Scots. Of these, the Britons first settled the island from sea
to sea, until divine vengeance, on account of their overweening pride, sent the Picts
and Saxons to drive them out. (Faletra, trans. 2008: 43)11
With this opening statement Geoffrey lays out his whole theme: the loss of the original
insular integrity and isomorphic unity between Britain and the Britons through the
humiliation of submission to foreigners.
He immediately tells us, however, that the Britons themselves were once newcomers
to the island. They are the descendants of a band of Trojans led by Brutus, the great-
grandson of Aeneas whose other descendants, Romulus and Remus, would later found
Rome. Clearly modelled on, but made to come before these famous twins, Brutus is in
many ways a classic Greek-style oikist, the colonial city founder often forced by blood
on his hands to become the leader of a new people in a new place (cf. Dougherty 1993).
Innocently fulfilling a pre-natal prophecy that he would kill both his parents, Brutus
causes his mother’s death in childbirth and grows up to shoot his father accidentally
with an arrow. Having symbolically effaced his own origins, he is driven from Italy into
an exile that enacts a lineage schism and marks him as both a break from and a link
back to the people and place from which the Roman Empire will arise.
Significantly, in his account of Brutus’s background, Geoffrey makes no direct mention
of Rome. He is careful not to trace Roman origins to Aeneas and credits that common
ancestor of both Britons and Romans with no civic foundations. The first mention of
Rome comes well into Book II (Faletra, trans. 2008: 68) when Geoffrey informs the
reader that it was only after the descendants of Brutus had held Britain for many gener-
ations that Romulus and Remus established Rome. Rome is clearly a younger brother to
Britain. Not only that but, as Geoffrey mentions in passing, prior to Romulus and Remus,
King Ebraucas, the great-great-grandson of Brutus, had sent his thirty daughters back to
Italy to intermarry with the Trojan nobility. When the Trojans of Italy finally became the
Romans, therefore, they were already Britanno-Trojans.
This feminine colonization of proto-Romans by marriage was coincident, it should

be noted, with a masculine colonization of proto-Saxons by conquest. While the
daughters of King Ebraucus were replenishing the Trojans in Italy, their brothers
were subjugating Germany (Faletra, trans. 2008: 62). When the Saxons finally left
Germany to invade Britain, therefore, they were already Britanno-Saxons.
To return to Brutus, however: in accordance with an oracle from the goddess Diana,
he and his Trojan followers search for an island in the west called Albion. Per usual—
while divinity is still on your side—when they discover this “promised island” it is
“uninhabited except by a few giants” (cf. Numbers 13: 32 –33). The Trojans soon dis-
cover that these negligible aboriginals have “fled to caves in the mountains” in terror of
the newcomers, and Brutus renames the island “Britain” in his own honour (Faletra,
trans. 2008: 56).
For a thousand years, the Britons hold dominion over “the whole island”—tota
insula, a recurring phrase in Geoffrey’s narrative—where they successfully repel off-

shore interlopers. Left alone, however, they succumb to the metaphorically feminizing
vices of those content to stay at home: uxoriousness, fratricide, sodomy, civil war, and
even occasional female rule (Faletra, trans. 2008: 59 –83). The moral of this domestic
interlude appears to be that, even though they enjoy sovereignty over the whole island,
the Britons are in danger of losing the symbolically masculine ascendancy of the orig-
inal Trojan colonists if they remain introverted and pure. Holding onto sovereignty in
one place is not enough; to stay on top, the people must extend their sovereignty over
other places and other people. Having become indigenized—truly one with their static
island—the Britons are now susceptible to conquest as the full realization of their
feminization.
At just this perilous juncture, Caesar arrives. Undeniably, the story of lost British
wholeness and sovereignty over the totam insulam begins here, but this loss is initially
mitigated and its fullness postponed by past and renewed ties of kinship with the new
newcomers. Kellie Robertson has argued that Geoffrey’s claim to have translated his
history into Latin from a British original is a bid to oppose “an ostensibly ‘British’ his-
toriographical tradition to an Anglo-Latin one” (1998: 43). While concurring with her
insight that “to claim Trojan origins is to set yourself up as the rival of Rome, rather
than its descendant” (1998: 45), I differ from Robertson in reading Geoffrey—not as
seeking to “purge” (1998: 55 n. 4) the Roman/Latin presence from British history—
but as seeking to encompass the Roman phase of British history hierarchically via
genealogical and migratory as well as linguistic precedence (cf. Fox 1994).
According to Geoffrey’s chronology, for roughly four hundred years the Britons
effectively neutralize Roman conquest through intermarriages that produce
Romano-British kings and even reverse the direction of conquest in the figure of
the British-born Roman emperor, Constantine the Great. In the person of Constan-
tine, Geoffrey suggests, Britain virtually captures Rome and subsumes Roman sover-
eignty over Britain within a larger encompassing history of British sovereignty over
Britain (Faletra, trans. 2008: 103). At the same time, by launching imperial pro-
jects—especially the conquest of Gaul attributed to the Romano-British king, Maxi-
mianus—the British temporarily stave off feminization. The result of this phase of
126 M. W. Scott
reunion and confusion with Rome is a reassurance that no real loss has yet occurred.
Sovereignty over the island is still all in the greater Trojan kindred—a point under-
scored by the assertion that, during this same period, the Britons “disdained marrying
off their daughters to such a people” as the Picts (Faletra, trans. 2008: 96).
But then the Romans withdraw from Britain, leaving the Britons to fend for them-
selves against the increasing encroachments of these same Picts and the Scots. These
conditions reveal that a gendered social and spatial division has opened up among
the Britons. Although Britain remained essentially unconquered during the Roman
period—or so Geoffrey implies—a power has nevertheless gone out from the island.
When Maximianus had conquered Gaul and created Brittany as a “second Britain”,
he had taken—it now transpires—a whole generation of the noblest British youth,
leaving insular Britain in the hands of “unarmed and infirm farmers” (Faletra,
trans. 2008: 111). Imperialism has bifurcated the Britons into a symbolically masculine
elite that roused itself to take land on the Continent and a symbolically feminine pea-
santry that stayed behind, vulnerable to the invasions naturally suffered by the sedate.
In a speech put into the mouth of the Bishop of London, who strives to shame the
commoner remnant into taking action against the invaders, their plebeian origin is
equated with effeminacy:
I bewail the weakness and lack of guidance that has beset us since Maximianus bereaved
this realm of all its armed forces and young men. You, a people unskilled in the waging of
war, are all that is left, you whose real business lies in the tilling of fields or the trading of
wares. . . . So now what? . . . Can real men not be born of humble stock? Can a soldier not
be born into a farmer’s family, or a farmer from a military family? . . . I do not believe that
you people can forget how to be real men. Since you are men, act like men! Call upon
Christ to give you courage to defend your homes! (Faletra, trans. 2008: 113)
Emasculated and under siege, the insular Britons appeal to their brothers in Brittany,
offering them the sovereignty of the island in return for reinforcements. The events
leading to the advent of the Saxons and the birth of Arthur quickly unfold. Arthur’s
grandfather, Constantine II, arrives from Brittany to take the throne. His eldest son,
Constans, succeeds him but falls to the machinations of the usurper, Vortigern.
Then, fatally, Vortigern’s alliance with the Saxons allows them to gain the permanent
foothold on the island that will lead eventually to their triumph over the Britons. But,
as the prophecies of Merlin foretell to Vortigern, first will come the reign of Arthur and
his glorious though transient restoration of the totam insulam to British rule (Faletra,
trans. 2008: 130–142).
Under Arthur, Britain reaches its zenith. The Britons not only quell all invaders and
regain control of the island, they also become conquers again in their own right. They
take Ireland, Iceland, Norway, Denmark, and all of Gaul. But just as they are poised to
assail Rome, the gendered social fissure that overreaching imperialism opens up at
home gapes at Arthur’s back. The feminine side left behind grows venal and untrust-
worthy. Mordred—a younger sister’s-son who stayed at home as regent—seizes the
throne and begins living in open adultery with Guinevere, recalling Arthur to
Britain to reclaim his queen and crown.
With the Battle of Camlann, the cycle of loss and contraction begins again. The
departure of the wounded Arthur to Avalon signals a new depletion of power from
the island. The Saxons are soon resurgent, and the decimated Britons, like the dis-
placed giants before them, head for the hills; they withdraw to the interior of Wales
and Cornwall. There is one last British rally under the reign of the bloody Cadwallo,
but it is short-lived. His son Cadwallader furthers the depletion of the island by fleeing
with most of the surviving Britons to Brittany, leaving behind no one “except for the
meagre remnant of the Britons who had survived but had now withdrawn to the
remote forests of Wales” (Faletra, trans. 2008: 215).
Geoffrey’s account then closes on an uncanny note of hope. As Cadwallader is pre-
paring a fleet to retake Britain, an angelic voice tells him to stop. Now is not the
appointed hour, the voice tells him, for the Britons to regain their homeland. That
hour will come—as foretold by Merlin—but not yet. Geoffrey thus concludes his
history with the Britons in defeat but leaves his narrative open-ended enough to
become a stimulus to the “Breton hope”, the idea preserved in Welsh and Breton tra-
ditions that the insular Britons would one day reclaim the totam insulam aided by their
continental kinsmen—or perhaps by a healed and resurgent Arthur, “the once and
future king” (Malory 1971: 717; White 1958).12
The Matter of Makira

Like the Matter of Britain, the Matter of Makira is about the lost power of an island
formerly one in an uncompromised way with its proper inhabitants and the hope,
cherished by some, for future restoration. In this case, however, there is no text to
abridge. What follows is a list of seven recurrent themes drawn from conversations
and interviews with diversely positioned Makirans (primarily Arosi) whose utterances,
while distinctive, are always already part of what Bakhtin (1984: 90) would describe as
a greater “dialogic interaction” with others. Such a list provides only a standardizing
summary and cannot convey the “heteroglossia” (Bakhtin 1981: 270–272) composing
divergent understandings of the underground. Such a list also risks creating a false
sense of common belief. Although most Arosi are familiar with these themes and
enjoy talking about them, knowledge of and interest in stories about the underground
are not reliable indicators of whether someone believes them. Most people with whom
I spoke admitted they “don’t know what to think” (kakuahuna); they are intrigued,
even fascinated, but not necessarily persuaded.
Geoffrey’s history and my presentation of discourses about the Makiran under-
ground are clearly distant from one another in time, space, and form, yet the two
are more commensurable than might at first glance be evident. Each is simultaneously
a coherent construction and a multivocal phenomenon. In my attempts to describe
what I term the Matter of Makira, I too, like Geoffrey, craft unity out of diversity,
but I do so incidentally more than intentionally. While no ethnographic representation
can be purely objective or apolitical, I aspire here to give both a sense of the variety of
Makiran representations about the underground and an indication of how Makirans
themselves attempt to construct coherence out of that variety. Thus, whereas Geoffrey
128 M. W. Scott
strives to impose coherence on a diversity of voices that nonetheless remain audible
and living in his work, I strive to render the diversity of Makiran voices audible
while nonetheless imposing a degree of coherence on them. Both accounts,
I suggest, reveal the nature of matters as phenomena at once inducive of and resistant
to efforts at canonical formulation.
The first and most basic element of the Matter of Makira is, as previously indicated,
the transformation of the Maasina Rule-era image of an American-built underground
town into that of a marvellous subterranean army base run by a coalition of humans—
especially Euro-Americans—and the diminutive autochthons known as kakamora
(alternatively, pwapwaronga or pwapwaangora). Owing to this human–kakamora
alliance, the army controls supernormal weaponry and is endowed with psychic-like
communications and intelligence capabilities that mirror the strength, discernment,
and powers of invisibility ascribed to the kakamora. Although almost always envi-
sioned as military in essence, this underground realm is also sometimes described

as an ultra-modern city equipped with trucks, roads, multi-story buildings, shops,
eateries, and a mysterious pervasive light.
A second recurrent element in the Matter of Makira is the idea that the kakamora
preserve within the core of the island an ancient Makiran language and kastom.
Regarded as uniquely autochthonous to Makira, kakamora appear to be figures of
the primordial power of the island and to be associated with protecting its physical
integrity. They are most famous for having rescued Makira from disaster. Once,
according to an old (Fox 1924: 289–290) and still popular tale, a limestone column
known as Auu Rohu at the northwest end of Makira began to fall, and the island
began to sink. But the kakamora ran to bind the column back in place, saving the
island from collapse. In another narrative they build a sea wall to defend Makira
from flooding. This same narrative entails the claim of one Arosi matrilineage to be
descended from a female kakamora, a claim that implies autochthonous unity with
the materiality of Makira to which the kakamora elementally belong (Scott 2008).
In all of these representations, kakamora personify and reiterate the claim made in
the Arosi name for Makira: Hanuato‘o, “The Strong Island”.13
A third element is the sense of loss implicit in the second. The kakamora need to
preserve the original language and kastom of Makira because, in the above-ground
world, they have become corrupted. Most Arosi see the depletion of kastom as the
result of contact with Euro-American explorers, traders, and missionaries since the
sixteenth century—especially colonial rule under the British Solomon Islands Protec-
torate (1893–1978). But for some, this loss began with a longer history of what they
term “mixing” with people from elsewhere. Reframing theories that go back to John
‘Araubora, an influential Maasina Rule leader who died around 1964, some Arosi
suggest that various place-names on Makira are evidence that foreigners have been
colonizing the island since antiquity. The most elaborated of these place-name
origin stories pertains to Rohu. ‘Araubora is remembered as having taught that
“Rohu” derives from an older form, “Rome”, and that the name of the nearby river
(wai), Wai ‘Eteria, is an altered form of “Wai Italy”. These names, he claimed, are
proof that Arosi was once part of the Roman Empire. As evidence of this I was
shown a large boulder, lodged in a river high in the bush, reputed to bear a Roman
inscription. I was advised by my guide, however, that a storm had recently caused
the stone to roll over onto the inscription-bearing face.
In the current context, there is widespread concern that Makiran kastom continues
to be eroded by alien influences. But today one is more likely to hear that this is owing
to settlers from elsewhere in the Solomons, especially Malaitans. As a consequence, the
reclusive kakamora are now seldom seen. They have retreated with their pristine
knowledge of all things truly Makiran deep into their caves up in the bush.
A fourth element consists in Arosi assertions that the influence of the original
Makiran kastom, though lost, remains evident in the characteristics of members of
the putatively autochthonous Makiran matrilineages and their recent descendants
through males. Such “true” Makirans, according to my consultants, are outwardly
quiet, gentle, and generous, but endowed with an inner fortitude that will show
out—perhaps in uncanny ways—if others try to abuse them. They are, as one man
put it, “soft as wool but strong as iron”. People say that to follow true Makiran
kastom is to “follow the way of a woman”—especially the way of a mother—who
loves and feeds her children and welcomes visitors with hospitality. This maternal
nature makes true Makirans seem weak to outsiders, but is a sign of superior inner
strength that does not need to boast. Since the midst of the tension, what appear to
be new discourses describing Makira as “Motherland” have developed, and when
asked to account for these discourses, Arosi readily suggest that they refer to this
maternal Makiran character.
Fifth, diverse discourses generating the Matter of Makira combine to cast both
Euro-Americans and kakamora as agents who formerly took part of the original
power and kastom of Makira away but who have since returned. Their reunion with
the island and each other is now poised to restore Makira and Makiran kastom to orig-
inal purity and potency.
At least as far back as Maasina Rule, Arosi have entertained the theory that the whole
world—especially America—may be populated by the descendants of women taken
from Makira by the sixteenth-century Spanish explorers and the nineteenth-century
labour traders. This theory prompts many Arosi to speculate that any Euro-American
person visiting the island may belong to one of the Makiran matrilineages. The orig-
inal Maasina Rule-era rumour that Americans had built an underground town seems
to have been linked to this theory and to have inspired a hope that the lost children of
the stolen women had come back to assist and enrich their weaker poorer kin (Scott
2008; cf. Davies n.d.: 222 fn. 2; Laracy 1976: 123). It was also supposed that these retur-
nees might retain a purer form of Makiran language and kastom than Arosi themselves.
Today, similar hopes and suppositions attach to the Euro-Americans in the
underground.
Euro-Americans are also implicated in the loss and return of powers associated with
the kakamora. There are several expressions of this theme, but the one I encountered
most frequently in 2006 was the story of Waimwahi. Waimwahi is said to be the wise
and powerful chief of the kakamora, who was taken away by the Americans. In the US
he taught the Americans the secrets with which they have built up their high-tech
130 M. W. Scott
military arsenal. Significantly—given the consensus that the aircraft spotted during the
1998–2003 tension were nearly noiseless—his speciality was devising stealth weap-
onry. Every time he was shown a piece of equipment, he found it to be too noisy.
So he re-designed it for the Americans to make it operate in silence. Now, some
people say, Waimwahi has returned to Makira and is working in league with the
army underground. The powers that went out have come back and joined forces.
A sixth element is the idea that the underground army is working covertly to aggra-
vate inter-island tensions, break up the Solomons state, and lead Makira to federal or
independent statehood and regional dominance. When the army emerges there will be
a war to cleanse Makira of foreign ways and restore the kastom of the kakamora. Then
Makira as Motherland will serve as a peacemaker to the whole region. Development
and wealth will follow. All this is foretold, furthermore, in prophecies that are particu-
larly well known in the Rohu area. There, people repeat claims that messages hidden in
the Bible, encrypted in kastom stories, and inscribed on the land as symbolic rocks and
coral formations predict that this empowerment and development of Makira will
inaugurate the end times.
And, finally, the seventh element: Makira has its own once and future king in
Solomon Mamaloni. An integral part of the Matter of Makira is the rumour that
Mamaloni—who died in 2000—is still alive and working with or even, as one man
put it, enthroned as “King Solomon” in the underground. Although it could not be
said that Mamaloni brought lasting benefits to Makira, many Arosi look back on
his times in government as high points from which Makira has descended. Mamaloni’s
extended family has produced other prominent politicians and is highly respected
among Arosi. It forms, another consultant suggested, “a little royal family” for
Makira. Accordingly, there are now accounts that tell how one or another locally
revered figure—either the Maasina Rule leader John ‘Araubora or the Anglican mis-
sionary Charles E. Fox (1878–1977)—once noticed the young Mamaloni among his
school fellows and prophesied that the Solomons would one day rest on his shoulders
(cf. Isaiah 9: 6). During his years in government, some say, Mamaloni diverted
weapons and money to the underground and is now waiting to lead the army out
to establish Makiran autonomy.
“No Island is an Island”

Commonalities between the two matters are both broadly thematic and specific in
detail: loss of congruency between a people and their island symbolized by the meta-
phor of retreat to interior spaces—the remote forests of Wales or caves in the Makiran
bush; alienation of strength symbolized by departures—the noblest British youth to
Brittany or the chief of the kakamora to America; the hope of revitalizing reunion
between these two halves of a fractured whole; idealization of a former leader whose
life and death alike remain incomplete—the “mortally wounded” Arthur who may
yet be “healed” (Faletra, trans. 2008: 199; cf. Reeve 2007: 253) or the deceased yet
rumoured to be alive Mamaloni.14 Why do a twelfth-century account of British
history and early twenty-first century Arosi discourses about the Makiran under-
ground have so much in common?
One answer is the Bible. The Matter of Israel is the matter behind all matters in
Christian contexts (cf. Smith 2003). Beyond this important but insufficient explana-
tory factor, however, both these sets of discourses are the products of a particular
type of contingent historical configuration. This configuration involves the triangu-
lation of three elements: the perspective of the people of a protagonist place, a real
or perceived threat of invasion and symbolic feminization by a proximate colonial
other, and a remote colonial other who may be constructed as kin and potential ally
against the proximate colonial other. To attend to this configuration is, furthermore,
to see that the matters it produces are not matters in isolation; they are counter-
matters that imply and respond to other co-constituting counter-matters. As Marshall
Sahlins has put it, “No island is an island” (2004: 69; cf. Lévi-Strauss 1976: 327–328).
There is some controversy among historians of Britain and medievalists over

whether Geoffrey of Monmouth’s history should be read as “pro-Celtic” or “pro-
Norman” (Faletra 2000). In this section I take my lead from scholarship that suggests
these two readings are not mutually exclusive. I combine and build on two comp-
lementary analyses. First, I align myself with those who contend that Geoffrey’s aim
was to counter a burgeoning tradition of Anglo-Norman historiography that pre-
sumed and reinforced a synthesis between Normans and Anglo-Saxons as the defining
inhabitants and divinely chosen rulers of a realm called England (e.g. Davies 1996,
2000; Loyn 1988; Robertson 1998). The Matter of Britain came into being, according
to this reading, in answer to an already well-advanced Matter of England. And second,
I augment Patricia Ingham’s (2001: 40 –50) thesis that Geoffrey’s history is an overture
to the twelfth-century Norman colonizers of England and Wales to see themselves as
the hoped-for continental kin come to ally themselves with their insular cousins, the
Welsh, over against the English and reclaim Britain for Britons. The Matter of Britain,
according to this reading, offered Geoffrey’s Norman patrons an alternative synthesis
with an alternative axis of identity for a realm called Britain.
The historiographic corpus that Davies (1996) labels the Matter of England includes
a long tradition of denouncing the Britons, especially their marginalized remnant the
Welsh, in feminizing terms. Best exemplified by William of Malmesbury’s (1090–
1143) History of the English Kings and Henry of Huntington’s (1084–1155) History
of the English People, but building on the works of pseudo-Nennius (fl. 796), Bede
(673–735), and Gildas (fl. 540), this body of history portrays the Britons as the phys-
ically and morally degenerate vestige of a disinherited people abandoned by God in
favour of the English. Even their name has been effaced from the land. Thus, Henry
of Huntington writes that the theme of his history is “this, the most celebrated of
islands, formerly called Albion, later Britain, and now England” (Greenway, trans.
2002: xix). Repeatedly, in these works, the Welsh are stigmatized as an enfeebled
remnant of cowardly highlanders given over to the implicitly feminizing vices of men-
dacity, treachery, gluttony, incest, and sodomy. Moreover, these histories refer point-
edly to rumours of Arthur’s survival and the “Breton hope”, which they discredit as
“wild tales” (Mynors et al. eds and trans 1998: 27; cf. Ingham 2001: 21–50).
132 M. W. Scott
Clearly, Geoffrey writes in continuity with and double-voices much of this
longstanding excoriation and feminization of the Welsh. But his political strategy
vis-à-vis his Norman patrons and readers parallels, I suggest, his literary strategy
vis-à-vis Rome. Just as he mitigated Roman colonization as reinvigoration of the
Britons through reunion with a more active but junior line, so also he seeks to mitigate
Norman colonization by suggesting that the Normans too represent such a reinvigor-
ating but junior line. Against the narrative background of how the Romano-British
king Maximianus conquered Gaul and populated it with Britons, Geoffrey invites
the Normans to identify themselves as the returned descendants of this plantation
who, like the Romans before them, can reunite the Welsh with their lost masculinity
and claim sovereignty over “the whole island” as the legitimate heirs of Brutus (cf.
Ingham 2001: 42–43).
This is pro-Norman but also pro-British, or more accurately pro-Britanno-
Norman. More importantly, it is anti-Saxon and thus anti-Anglo-Norman. Geoffrey

is courting the new remote colonizer (the Normans) to align itself with the remnant
of the former rulers (the Welsh) against the old proximate colonizer (the English).
As previously noted, Geoffrey implies that the Saxons share in the lineage of Brutus
as the descendants of the sons of Ebraucus. But by suggesting that, without Saxon
mediation, Norman genealogy ascends back to Brutus as well, Geoffrey sandwiches
the Saxons chronologically between two phases of Britons that together nullify
Saxon/English claims to either a foundational role or ongoing sovereignty in
Britain. Saxons are hierarchically encompassed, on the one hand, by the precedence
of ancient Britons and superseded, on the other, by a Norman conquest that is
really a British re-conquest. Matter and counter-matter-making constitute a compe-
tition to see whose story and whose name will gain defining ascendancy in a semioti-
cally constructed plural polity.
This reading of Geoffrey and the dynamics of matter-making in twelfth-century
Britain both gains support from and offers insight into Arosi discourses about the
Makiran underground and the dynamics of matter-making in contemporary
Solomon Islands. It would take a team of ethnographers split up across several differ-
ent regions to track all the matters and counter-matters currently in production in
Solomon Islands. Scales (2007: 190–192) and Sofield (2006: 184) have published
data pertaining to western Solomons and Guadalcanal, respectively, that could be
read as matters-in-the-making in those regions. And although I have not conducted
extensive research with Malaitans, I am aware of evidence that a polyphony of dis-
courses may be generating a Matter of Malaita, some versions of which exhibit triangu-
lation among Malaitans, entities perceived by Malaitans as local transformations of
long-term colonial influences, and a distant potential vindicator with whom some
Malaitans are seeking alliance as kin.
It has been observed, especially since the onset of the tension, that many Malaitans
experience themselves as victims of a succession of remote and proximate alien
forces—British colonial rule, the independent Solomon Islands government, other
Solomon Islanders, and now RAMSI—all bent on overriding Malaitan forms of ances-
tral kastom with foreign ways (Akin 1999; Allen 2009; Keesing 1992). This experience
of oppression appears to be fostering the elaboration of a variety of longstanding

Malaitan ideas, prevalent mainly in northern and central parts of the island, according
to which Malaitans and their ancestral forms of kastom derive from the Lost Tribes of
Israel or other biblical figures (Brown 2005; Burt 1983; Timmer 2008). Recently,
leaders of churches and movements that develop these discourses have called for
Malaitan independence under the theocratic rule of a pan-Malaitan kastom under-
stood as equivalent to Jewish law. In conjunction with these initiatives, some have
made overtures to the state of Israel in quest of fraternal recognition and assistance.15
There is also evidence that some of these Malaitan discourses and projects involve
elements that are similar to those constructing the Matter of Makira. It is said that on
Leli, a small island off the Malaitan east coast, there have been many reports of ships
that suddenly appear and disappear and nocturnal sightings of Israelis reputed to be
living underneath Leli (Johanna Whiteley and Jonathan Tracey, personal communi-
cation 8/12/2010; cf. Maziola 2010). Rumours now circulate that secret militias, some-
times identified as part of the Israeli army, are training in the Malaitan bush (Terry
Brown, personal communication 6/7/2010; Moore 2008: 397). And, as on Makira,
on Malaita there have been accounts of strange unidentified aircraft (Clive Moore, per-
sonal communication 19/8/2007), one of which allegedly disappeared into the sea near
Leli but re-emerged several days later and took off like a seaplane (Clive Moore,
personal communication 24/9/2010; Osifelo 2010; Solomon Times Online 2010).16
Beyond representing a competing version of a shared paradigm, however, what
makes the Matter of Makira a counter-matter to the Matter of Malaita is the way it
expresses an Arosi sense of collective feminine gender vis-à-vis Malaitans and responds
by hierarchically encompassing Euro-American identity and power. Just as Geoffrey
counters an Anglo-Norman alliance that feminizes the Welsh, the Matter of Makira
counters a history of Malaita-centric Euro-American engagement with Solomon
Islands that has feminized Makirans. And just as Geoffrey promotes Britanno-
Norman kinship and alliance to restore wholeness to Britain, the Matter of Makira
asserts Euro-American-Makiran kinship and alliance to restore wholeness to Makira.
In their counter-matter-making discourses, Arosi frequently construct essentializing
“Us”/“Them” typologies that describe Makirans as “following the way of a woman” and
Malaitans as “following the way of a man”. As evidence, they make a series of represen-
tations about themselves and Malaitans. Makirans are short; Malaitans are tall. Makir-
ans “like to be last” and to “make themselves low”; Malaitans “will go first” and “put
themselves up high”. Makirans are “quiet”; Malaitans are “noisy and fight”. Makirans
are “slow to anger and slow to retaliate”; Malaitans are “quick to take revenge”. Makir-
ans are “kind, loving, and law abiding”; Malaitans “steal and spoil things”. Makirans are
“peacemakers” whose symbol is the dove figured on the West Makira flag; Malaitans are
“warriors” whose symbol is the eagle shown on their provincial flag.
These typologies were more prominent among Arosi in 2006 than in the early 1990s,
and they are palpably conditioned by the tension on Guadalcanal. But they are also, I
suggest, informed by an ongoing dialogic interaction between Euro-Americans and
Solomon Islanders. In this interaction, Euro-American tendencies to identify and
evaluate whole sets of Islanders in terms of implicitly gendered physical, psychological,
134 M. W. Scott
and social types have articulated with indigenous idioms of alterity—such as the
widely attested bush/coast dichotomy (Bennett 1987: 187)—to produce a semiotics
of insular stereotypes (Keesing n.d.: 38 –41). Out of this process, a dominant but con-
tested model has emerged that privileges Malaitans as the active masculine pole in a
series of analogous oppositions with supposedly passive feminine peoples identified
with other islands and regions, especially Makira, Santa Isabel, and Guadalcanal (see
Map 1), but also some parts of Western Province (cf. Dureau 1998: 206–207; Kabu-
taulaka 2001).
Nineteenth and early twentieth-century labour and mission discourses, among
others, tended to masculinize Malaitans as big, strong, warlike, and competitive and
to feminize other island-specific populations as small, weak, timid, and indolent
(e.g. Coombe 1911: 265–266; Dickinson 1927: 56; cf. Banivanua-Mar 2007: 104–
110, 119–120; Corris 1973: 88; Keesing 1986: 167). Further developed by academic
and journalistic representations and double-voiced by Solomon Islanders, such dis-

courses have contributed to the production of a set of contrasting characterizations.
Malaitans are “the productive active people” (Kwa‘ioloa & Burt 2007: 114); other
Islanders, by implication, do little. Malaitans are the most numerous and mobile
population, and “wherever there is a locality that holds employment opportunities
. . . [a Malaitan] can be found there”; this “may not be to the pleasure of others
already there” who, by implication, are less ambitious homebodies (Gina 2003:
273). Malaitans are swift to retaliate when “things break the Malaitan kastom” (HG
in Allen 2009: 9; cf. Scales 2007: 194); other Islanders, by implication, are “gentle”
and long-suffering when they feel their kastom is not respected (Maeliau 2003: 24;
cf. Sofield 2006: 182).
Reinforcing these oppositions of temperament are diversely positioned descriptions
of social organization and land tenure in the region. The result is an increasingly indi-
genized map of Solomon Islands that shades Malaita as a space of patrilineal—and
patriarchal—ideology amidst a plurality of matrilineal spaces vulnerable to appropria-
tion by in-marrying Malaitans (Maetala 2008; Department of Foreign Affairs and
Trade 2003).17 Imputing colonizing intentions to Malaitans, one of my Arosi consult-
ants articulated a Makiran version of a general regional worry: “Malaitans say, ‘Let’s
marry to Makira, become plentiful, and chase away the Makirans’”.
In this Malaita-versus-the-rest gendered dichotomy, the feminization of Makirans is
not unique, but it is diachronically well documented. The earliest ethnological accounts
of Solomon Islanders describe Makirans as “small and weak” (Dumont d’Urville 1843:
104; cf. Bradford 1861) and “shorter, less vigorous” compared with other Islanders
(Guppy 1887: 103). By the 1880s, labour recruiters were avoiding Makirans because
they were already “reputed the laziest of any in the [Solomons] group” (Cromar
1935: 206; cf. Keesing 1986: 167). “They have not the stamina of the Malaita man in
open combat”, says an early twentieth-century trader; “[a]mbush” and “other
treachery” is “the Makira man’s long suit” (Dickinson 1927: 56). And British
Solomon Islands Protectorate officials have this to say about Makira in the 1940s:
the people are “extremely lazy”, “lack character”, and are “adverse [sic] to express an
opinion or take the lead” (Forster 1943) in an area that “has always been treated as
the conderella [sic, read Cinderella] of the Protectorate” (Barrow & Davies 1947; cf.
Davies n.d.: 170).
It is likely that, as a European whose knowledge of Solomon Islands is Makira-
centric, I audit and respond to this ongoing dialogic interaction from a particular pos-
ition. But I would argue that the historic Malaita-centric Euro-American engagement
with Solomon Islands continues inadvertently to reinforce the image of Malaitans as
the fittest and most formidable Solomon Islanders whose pugnacity and drive make
them the naturally dominant force in their country (cf. Keesing 1978: 244). Histori-
cally, more anthropologists have worked on Malaita than anywhere else in the Solo-
mons. And I know of two major historiographic works now in preparation devoted
to detailed documentation of Malaita. Although some Malaitans appear to be
turning to Israel for external validation, they continue to win the attention of the
scribes of the remote Euro-American colonizer, and there is little question that—in
the Euro-American record—the quintessential Solomon Islander is a Malaitan. This

makes me, I realize, something of a latter-day Geoffrey, recruited by my Arosi contacts
to compose the counter-matter of Makira.
A significant difference, of course, between the Matter of Britain and the Matter of
Makira is that, whereas Geoffrey casts the Britons as allochthons who are—at least
initially—gendered masculine vis-à-vis the aboriginal giants they frighten into moun-
tain caves, the Matter of Makira prizes autochthony and represents true power as with-
drawn into analogous—but inversely valued—caves up in the bush that lead deep into
the underground. When the Britons suffer the sedimentation of former stranger-kings
into layers of assimilated aboriginals through subsequent waves of colonization, they
are truly emasculated. They have lost a masculine-gendered ascendancy that Geoffrey
implies can be regained only through re-conquest and is best held onto through
limited imperial expansion. Feminization is unambiguously a degradation to be
overcome.
In contrast—we might expect—Arosi ought to be found representing their femi-
nine-gendered condition as an asset to be safeguarded or purified from despoilers.
And, very often, this appears to be the case. Like Malaitans who appropriate their
reputation for aggression as a virtue and fulfilment of Malaitan kastom, Arosi who
say they “follow the way of a woman” seek to construe this as a virtue and manifes-
tation of Makiran kastom. For a few of my consultants this idiom, and the English
term “Motherland” used as a proper name for Makira, can implicitly refer to matrili-
neal models of continuity of being and land tenure. As noted already, however, a
common Arosi exegesis of both these figures of speech is that they refer to the way
true Makirans display the moral and behavioural qualities of a giving and strong
maternal figure. These qualities and behaviours—being gentle and quiet, welcoming
strangers, sharing food, disciplining with love, etc.—are furthermore those said to
prove the authenticity of the members of a truly autochthonous matrilineage as the
agents and arbiters of kastom in their territory (Scott 2007: 8–9). Up to the present,
Arosi chiefs have been male, yet one man observed that “chiefs have to do the way
of women”, suggesting that this refers to an ideal form of understated leadership in
accordance with what he called “kastom ‘culture’ . . . the way of life of Makira”.18
136 M. W. Scott
Another way in which people extoll having the character of a woman is to posit an
essential congruity between true Makiran kastom and Christian values. To follow the
way of a woman is, in effect, to follow the way of Christ. One man, for example, the-
orized that the Anglican Melanesian Brothers—who are sometimes credited with effi-
cacious powers because of their sanctified way of life (Montgomery 2006: 295–315)—
owe their charisma to the power of Makira and Makiran kastom. He bases this theory
on awareness that, although the Melanesian Brotherhood was founded by Ini Kopuria
of Guadalcanal in 1925, it could justifiably be said to have had an antecedent origin on
Makira (Macdonald-Milne n.d.). To become a Brother is thus, he said, to become
“Makiranized”—to acquire the tranquillity and inner fortitude of a true person of
the island.
These representations endorse having the character of a woman as the true auto-
chthonous way of Makira and as complete and sufficient to itself. To have the character
of a woman, they suggest, may be to appear weak and quiescent, but it is not to be
bereft of strength or the capacity to be dangerous, especially if provoked. Perhaps
double-voicing the colonial stereotype of Makirans as lacking stamina and resorting
to treachery, Arosi representations of the Makiran capacity for strength sometimes
associate this with the sudden revelation of unsuspected power. “I’m like a woman,
weak, and not strong”, explained one man. “In our kastom you won’t show your
strength. You make yourself low and don’t say that you are strong. Then the person
who wants to kill you will be surprised that you’re stronger than him when he
attacks”. The implied enemy likely to underestimate a Makiran is, of course, a Malai-
tan. Another man made this explicit: “If you argue with a Malaitan he’ll say, ‘You’re a
woman of Makira.’ But when a person of Makira is angry he is dangerous as well”. Such
utterances, of which I heard several, articulate the discourses Arosi are worried Malai-
tans may be uttering about Makirans and attempt pre-emptively to rebut them.19 They
also highlight the way in which the Makiran underground army figures the feminine-
gendered Makiran condition as Arosi imagine it. Like the island of Makira itself, a
Makiran person looks defenceless and vulnerable, but both have a hidden force
within that will strike back if struck at first.
Discourses about the underground are, in fact, the clearest register in which Arosi
assert the superiority of having the character of a woman, understood as the expression
of autochthonous Makiran power. Through these discourses Arosi position this fem-
inine power as the source of Euro-American achievements in science and technology.
As explained above, the Matter of Makira takes credit for American strength on the
grounds that some Americans are matrilineal Makirans who have furthermore appro-
priated the powers of the kakamora chief, Waimwahi. Now this synergy has come
home to Makira and is producing a new generation of even more fabulous equipment
and capabilities. Headquartered inside Makira—which Arosi stress is obscure and see-
mingly of no account—the underground army is leading Solomon Islands, but is
doing so in the way of a woman. Silently and invisibly the army is preparing
Solomon Islands for the full epiphany of Makiran power. When this happens, the res-
toration of Makiran kastom to its full strength will draw the whole region under the
peaceful and prosperous dominion of the Motherland. To any Euro-American
onlooker, the message in this matter is: recognize your affinity with and debt to the
true autochthonous way of Makira and esteem it above that of Malaita.
There are signs, however, that some Arosi have not convinced themselves that to have
the character of a woman is a condition of completeness and sufficiency. The most
revealing of these is an apparently new interpretation I encountered in 2006 of a
myth well-known throughout the southeast Solomons. This story accounts for the geo-
physical fact that Malaita is divided into two portions, Big and Small Malaita (see Map
1). It describes how a large animate rock traversed the sea from an origin point on
Makira and cut Malaita into two, coming to rest on the far side of Malaita. In the
early 1990s I had learned variants of this tale that, in contrast to published versions
(Fox 1924: 289; Keevil 1972: 1–3; Mead 1973: 221), featured two stones, a brother
and a sister. Owing to a falling out with their mother, the two stones fled from their
bush village in Arosi and went out to sea as if to leave the island. But then they
parted ways. Only the brother-stone, Hauhuari‘i, left; he travelled north, split
Malaita, and never returned. The sister-stone, Haurae, went back to a coastal bay
and became the proto-human progenitor of a new matrilineage (Scott 2007: 209–212).
By 2006 this divergence between lithomorphic cross-sex siblings had acquired a new
layer of meaning. This geological event, several people explained, accounts for the
difference between Makirans and Malaitans. “The woman, Haurae, came back, there-
fore we live like women”, said one man. “The man left and went to Malaita, and so they
follow the man. As a consequence, they fight all the time”. With a hint of resignation,
his neighbour opined: “The strength and bravery of the people of this island left then
[when the rock left]”. But, as a consultant in another village conjectured, things might
have been different: “If Hauhuari‘i had stayed here and Haurae had not come back, we
would be like Malaitans and they would be like we are now”.20
Arosi are uncertain, however, when this “big change” occurred. Some seem to
regard it as having been a primordial event, part of the cosmogonic processes that
made Makira and Malaita the way they are. Others speculate that Hauhauri‘i left
when “the church came” (cf. Tomlinson 2009: 67–84). In either case, having the char-
acter of a woman is construed as a loss. The structure of thought needed to imagine
away the implied ontological minus sign from beside that which has been gendered
feminine remains as overdue, it seems, as the return of Arthur or the emergence of
the underground army.
Conclusion: Matters as Aesthetic Politics

I have suggested that comparison between the Matter of Britain and Arosi discourses
about the Makiran underground recommends matter-making as a portable European
concept useful for understanding such discourses and their cultural and political
potentialities. By this I do not mean to imply that the European past is now legible
in the Arosi present because Arosi have finally caught up with medieval Europeans
at a notch labelled “pre-modern proto-national ethnic community” on a linear scale
of social development.21 The colonial triangulation I identify as common to both
twelfth-century Britain and contemporary Arosi could, theoretically, arise anywhere
138 M. W. Scott
at any time as a contingent constellation of elements that are acutely—if not
uniquely—generative of the loss, dislocation, self-mourning, jealousy, and latent
aggression that typify matters as dynamic, polyphonic, and prolific cycles of place-
sacralizing and people-producing discourses.
My proposal is that contemplating the Makiran underground in terms of the Euro-
pean concept of matter-making enables us to recognize that Arosi discourses about the
underground are producing an object for aesthetic contemplation—a vehicle for affec-
tive experience—as much as a political agenda (cf. Goldstein 1993: 133–149). This is
not to say that all such discourses constitute matter-making; comparable phenomena
in Melanesia and elsewhere are too pluriform for any single analytical approach. But
the paradigm of matter and counter-matter-making offers one such approach, one
that enables us to identify at least some current elaborations of such talk as examples
of a global form for experiencing place-based identity and cultural heritage as always
already lost. It confirms the insight that loss—perhaps especially loss of masculine
gender in relation to colonizers and significant neighbours—is part of what drives
the making of matters and gives them much of their evocative pathos (Ingham 2001).
In such pathos, furthermore, reside future potentialities. Like the Matter of Britain,
the Matter of Makira is a thing of beauty, a collective opera, a quasi-literary romance
that has begun to endow Makira—in the eyes of some Makirans—with a special inef-
fable mystique. As an aesthetic production, it entails the power to inspire Makirans to
a variety of identity-based projects—some positive, some problematic—but all, in one
way or another, competitive with other islands and other matters in the Solomons.
The Matter of Makira is evident, for example, as a referent in and a suggested spur to
Arosi initiatives towards environmental conservation and tourism development. In an
effort to rally support for sustainable development of the Rohu plateau, the Arosi West
Development Coordination Council opened a March 28, 2007, posting to the website
of the Makira Conservation Community Foundation with the following preamble:
Rohu, blessed with various Makira historical tradition and a richness of cultural heritage
and stories of legends . . . the likes of the kakamora, the legendary underground world,
mysterious military activities, stories of the island’s past engraved on rock so our
future generations remember . . . will only come alive again by conservation mechanisms
and tourism development. (Arosi West Development Coordination Council 2007)
The hope palpable in this posting that the underground might constitute a “cultural
heritage” strong enough to attract visitors from abroad was equally cherished
among many of my Arosi hosts, who enthusiastically acted as my tour guides on
the trail of the pleasurably elusive underground.
When I travelled around Arosi I was shown marvellous things. Here is where the
great kakamora, Waimwahi, sat down—see his impression on the stone; here is the
entrance to a kakamora cave; here is a boulder on which the ancient Romans left an
inscription. Several of my consultants gave variant enumerations of what they
termed “the seven wonders of Makira”. These included an undersea freshwater
spring, several distinctive coral formations, and the coastal cliffs and caves at
Rohu—all interpreted as topographic prophecies that the end times will begin in
Arosi, but not until the underground army has surfaced, releasing vast stores of wealth
and resources hidden inside Makira. I took several boat rides around the northwest end
of the island to see some of these formations and to photograph the caves at Rohu—the
alleged portals to the underground from which army personnel and submarines are
said secretly to come and go. These places are the Tintagel, the Glastonbury, the Stone-
henge of Makira (cf. Berthelot 2004: 144–145). The Matter of Britain is a major tourist
industry in the UK. Enter “King Arthur” and “tours” into any web browser and you will
hit a multitude of sites vying to entice you to come and experience the numinous places
associated with Arthuriana. My Arosi hosts see their island as worthy of an equivalent
marketing drive that could move foreign tourists to come and explore the mystery of
the Matter of Makira.
But like matter-making—or rather, as matter-making by other means—the market-
ing of matters is not proceeding in isolation. Matter-marketing appears, in fact, to be
another register in which Solomon Islanders are competing among themselves for the
vindicating attention of outsiders, especially Euro-Americans. Would-be promoters of
the Matter of Makira have an unwitting ally in Errol Allbon (2005), a New Zealander
whose personal perspective on Solomon Islands tourism potential, published in the
Solomon Star newspaper, proposes that Makira might be developed into a “UFO spot-
ting” destination. Apparently equally unaware of the matter-making interests he may
be serving, former Royal Australian Air Force engineer, Marius Boirayon, has brought
notoriety to Malaita and Guadalcanal through his web-based claims that these islands
are the loci of intense UFO activities, powerful giants, and secret underground bases.22
From the point of view of the foreign ufologist, theosophist, or conspiracy theorist
attracted to the region in quest of aliens, the lost continent of Mu, Solomons sas-
quatch, or underground bases, one island is as good as another. From the points of
view of people from particular islands, however, there are true accounts and “lies”.
In 2006 I interviewed an Arosi man in his early twenties who was studying at the
Honiara Centre of the University of the South Pacific. As we talked about the myster-
ious aircraft that he and others had reported seeing around Makira during the tension,
he expressed vexation that Boirayon was saying that the UFO base is on Malaita. Pro-
voked by Internet content by Boirayon he had recently accessed, he said:
But we all know it is Makira only. Ask any person in the Solomons. Perhaps if the person
who wrote the article had modern technology to detect these people, it might be true. But
if a Solomon Islander just told him, then he lied to him—he’s a white man after all.
This kind of proprietary interest in key claims and discourses both supports the thesis
that such claims and discourses constitute new matters and revivifies for contempor-
ary readers what the old matters originally constituted. Seldom quoted in full in dis-
cussions of the history of the concept of a matter, Bodel’s Song of the Saxons
unambiguously reveals that a matter is simultaneously a source of fascinating enter-
tainment and a political force. It is a definitively agonistic art form through which a
poet like Bodel seeks to discredit and subordinate—indeed to feminize—other
matters as rivals.
140 M. W. Scott
There are but three matters known to every estate:
Those of France and of Britain and of Rome the great.
But these three by no means are of similar weight.
The stories of Britain are such charming lies;
Those of Rome give good counsel and make us all wise;
Those of France appear truer with every sunrise.
Among these three matters the surest attests
That the crown of the French must surpass all the rest,
So that all other sovereigns believing in God
Must by Christian law reign under its rod.
(Bodel 1989: 2, trans. K. L. Ovist and M. W. Scott; cf. 1992: 15)
With these lines Bodel asserts the superiority of the Matter of France as enduring truth
over the Matter of Britain as “charming lies” (vain et plaisant) and the superiority of
the Capetian kings of France as lords over the Plantagenet kings of England as vassals.
Probably composed shortly after Henry II of England was forced to pay homage to
Philip II of France in 1189, the poem refutes Norman claims implicit in the Matter
of Britain to sovereignty on the Continent and elevates the Matter of France as a
divine mandate for the ascendancy of the French crown over all of Christendom.
Matters, since the inception of the notion it seems, have been made to do what they
are about. Just as the elements that constitute matters express the will to stave off
the feminizing effects of feared or actual colonization and recover a supposed
former unity of being between a people and their place, matters—once constituted
as such—become the further means by which such aesthetically powerful expressions
of political will proceed. They begin to compete to colonize and encompass one
another.
This observation points, finally, to the more sobering reality that some versions of
the Matter of Makira intimate less irenic registers of competition than tourism devel-
opment or poetry. Some versions predict armed confrontation, especially between
Makirans and Malaitans. The primary agent hidden in the underground is, after all,
an army, and the anticipated use of preternatural military force to purify, vindicate,
and elevate Makira is sometimes a feature of Arosi talk about the underground.
This talk entails, in other words, the birth of tragedy—in the Nietzschean sense—
with its double-edged power for art and life and life that imitates art—sometimes
as war. It entails the potential to aestheticize violence as the fight to overcome femin-
ization or succumb to it utterly among beautiful ruins. Awareness of this undeniably
disturbing side of Arosi discourses about the underground does not render it tractable,
however. It is impossible to predict what projects such talk will or will not inspire and
inform. At best, re-conceptualized as matter and counter-matter-making, this talk can
be overheard and understood as part of a larger conversation—an inter-island compe-
tition to secure the most encompassing identity in Solomon Islands.
Acknowledgements
This article draws on field research carried out in 1992–1993, 2003, and 2006. I am
greatly indebted to the people of Arosi for sharing their hospitality, experiences,
thoughts, and stories during these periods. I acknowledge the Wenner-Gren

Foundation for Anthropological Research, the London School of Economics and
Political Science, and the Social and Economic Research Council of the UK (Grant
No: RES-000-23-1170) for their generous support. Earlier versions of the article
were presented in the Social Anthropology Seminar Series, University of Edinburgh
(Oct. 2008); the Research Seminar on Anthropological Theory, London School of
Economics (Nov. 2008); the Perth Medieval and Renaissance Group and the Centre
for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, University of Western Australia (July 2010);
and (in abstentia) to participants in the “Cargo Cults, Kastom, and Kago Kalja”
working session at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Social Anthropology
in Oceania, Alexandria, VA (Feb. 2010). I thank the participants at these venues for
their thoughtful engagement with the paper, in particular, Magnus Course, Marc
Tabani, Lamont Lindstrom, Debra McDougall, and Andrew Lynch. The article has
also benefitted from the constructive comments of three anonymous reviewers for
History and Anthropology. But, I especially recognize Krista Ovist for co-conceiving
the comparison, consulting on its development, and collaborating on translations
from Jean Bodel.
Notes
[1] Sightings of non-routine but conventional air traffic may have stimulated these claims. People
may have seen, for example, aircraft deployed by the New Zealand Defence Force as part of
its 1999 “Exercise Tropic Twilight” (http://www.oag.govt.nz/2003/east-timor-health/docs/
timor-health.pdf [accessed 2/7/2008]) or transport used by expeditions such as the 2006
Galathea 3 search for gingers on tropical islands (http://www.dalbergpoulsen.com/recent.
html [accessed 31/8/2007]).
[2] For additional analyses of Maasina Rule (also termed Marching Rule), see Akin (1993: 319–
383), Burt (1994: 171– 201), Keesing (1978), Laracy (1983) and Scott (2007: 105–129).
[3] Others have argued against this interpretation, however (e.g. Keesing 1978; Worsley 1968).
[4] Historian Pocock (1975) coined this term to overwrite “British Isles” with a neutral name
inclusive of Ireland, the Isle of Man, the Orkneys, and the Shetlands. Such relexification
maps ongoing transformations of this conflict.
[5] By “romance of place” I do not mean an idealized, dreamy, or exoticizing representation of a
place. Rather, I mean “romance” in the sense of a vernacular treatment of pleasurably exciting
incidents and adventures that may contain fabulous elements but also make claims to histori-
cal verity (Auerbach 1974; Baugh 1967: 173 –199; Strohm 1971).
[6] My use of the concept of dialogic polyphony is informed by the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin,
especially 1984.
[7] Here, I take as my methodological precedent Sahlins’ (2004) project of interrogating prima
facie similarities between the mid-nineteenth century “Polynesian War” in the Fiji Islands
and the Peloponnesian War of the fifth century BCE in order to render these very different
histories mutually illuminating.
[8] The chief secondary source for the biography of Geoffrey of Monmouth is Curley (1994).
[9] On developments towards “modern” authorship in the medieval period, see Bennett (2005:
38 –43).
[10] For example, discourses about what some Makirans refer to as a kakamora stone, which they
describe as the source of the underground army’s extraordinary powers (Scott, forthcoming),
142 M. W. Scott
could be compared to aspects of the Arthurian grail cycle, especially as represented by
Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival.
[11] See Reeve (2007) for the Latin text of the Historia Regum Britanniae.
[12] In his later work, The Life of Merlin, Geoffrey presents the possibility that Morgen of Avalon
may be able to heal Arthur’s wound. As Faletra (2000, 2008: 200) points out, however, in the
History of the Kings of Britain, Geoffrey never unequivocally asserts that the prophesied agent
of British restoration will be Arthur. That understanding appears only in later texts, many of
which represent the hope of Arthur’s return as longstanding popular belief in Brittany and
Wales (e.g. Loomis 1941, 1959a, 1959b).
[13] Historically, the island has also been known as San Cristoval.
[14] The parallels are even closer between the Matter of Makira and those versions of the Matter of
Britain according to which Arthur and his men lie sleeping under a mountain (see Loomis
1959b), a motif likewise attached to a myriad heroes and kings in the folkloric traditions of
Europe.
[15] Others appear to be turning to Islam, Sharia Law, and theories of Arabic origins for renewed
Malaitan identity (McDougall 2009; Moore 2008).
[16] Boirayon’s (2003a, 2003b, 2009) sensationalist conspiracy theory publications about what he
calls UFOs and dragon or diamond snakes operating from subterranean bases on Malaita
(and Guadalcanal) could be read as evidence of such accounts.
[17] Some academics have avoided applying terminologies of unilineal descent without qualifica-
tion to the Solomon Islands contexts they study (e.g. Dureau 1998; Hviding 2003; Keesing
1971). In recent accounts of social tensions in Solomon Islands, however, I detect an
increased willingness to employ them (e.g. Braithwaite et al. 2010: 19; Kabutaulaka 2001;
Moore 2004: 95), perhaps in response to new forms of insular self-essentialization.
[18] Solomon Islanders from other regions, including Malaita, would likewise describe their local
kastom as mandating and prizing such qualities and behaviours (e.g. Gegeo 1998).
[19] I cannot confirm that Malaitans refer to Makirans as women. But some Malaitan matter-
making seems to express such a view of Guadalcanal people. An origin story told by the
Malaitan Michael Kwa‘ioloa claims for example that:
the Guadalcanal people are descended from Malaitans from Siale in central Kwara‘ae
who lived in the area of Rere on Guadalcanal. . . .When those people returned to Siale
they left a woman on Guadalcanal who died and was buried at a place called Vunua-
nuli, at Ruafatu. That is why in Guadalcanal the woman is the head of the family or
clan, because it was a woman who was left when they returned to Malaita. (Kwa‘ioloa
& Burt 2007: 114)
This is a myth of colonization and a colonizing myth. It hierarchically encompasses both the
people of Guadalcanal and their matrilineal ideology as derived from and subordinate to the
people of Malaita and their agnatic ideology on the grounds that Malaita is to Guadalcanal
as male is to female. With similarly gendered colonizing connotations, some Langalanga Malai-
tans assert that “‘the Langalanga control the whole country’” (in Guo 2006: 35) because a certain
type of shell money that only they produce is widely used in bride price payments. Through this
money, the Langalanga stand as a collective father in relation to the children born to women
purchased with their money: “the women would then give birth to children. Therefore,
Langalanga shell money and [Langalanga] power is in their blood” (in Guo 2006: 35).
[20] This same consultant attributed to some Malaitans an awareness that their bellicose nature
derives from Hauhuari‘i: “People of ‘Are‘are know about Hauhuari‘i; ‘You Makirans have
spoiled us’ [they say]. . . .They know it is a rock from Makira. Some old men know the
story of the rock”. Like the Kwara‘ae and Langalanga discourses described in note 19, these
representations could be said to entail colonizing implications. Without employing myths
or metaphors of descent, this man nevertheless suggests that Makiran masculinity is, in effect,
the father of Malaitan masculinity.
[21] While I recognize the many parallels between Arosi discourses and those Clark (1997) docu-
ments in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea, it seems to me that Clark’s identification of a
“Gothic world view” in Melanesia might imply, perhaps inadvertently, such a developmental
approach.
[22] For example, http://www.thesolomongiants.com/ (accessed 10/11/2003); http://www.ne
xusmagazine.com/articles/dragonsnake.htm (accessed 16/3/2005); http://www.thewatche
rfiles.com/giants/solomon-giants.htm (accessed 7/12/2010).
References
Akin, D. W. (1993), Negotiating Culture in East Kwaio, Malaita, Solomon Islands, PhD Thesis, Uni-
versity of Hawaii, HI.
Akin, D. (1999), “Compensation and the Melanesian State: Why the Kwaio keep claiming”, Contem-
porary Pacific, vol. 11, no. 1, pp. 35–67.
Allan, C. H. (1950), The Marching Rule Movement in the British Solomon Islands Protectorate: An
Analytical Survey, Master’s Thesis, Cambridge University, Cambridge.
Allan, C. H. (1951), “Marching Rule: A nativistic cult of the British Solomon Islands”, South Pacific,
vol. 5, pp. 79–85.
Allbon, E. (2005), “A Kiwi’s view of SI tourism”, Solomon Star, 9 May, p. 7.
Allen, M. G. (2009), “Resisting RAMSI: Intervention, identity and symbolism in Solomon Islands”,
Oceania, vol. 79, no. 1, pp. 1–17.
Arosi West Development Coordination Council. (2007), “Rohu, Land of the Kakamora must be
Conserved”, 28 March, [Online] available at http://www.myspace.com/mccf_makira/blog/
246500578
Auerbach, E. (1974), Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. W. R. Trask,
Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.
Bakhtin, M. (1981), The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. M. Holquist,
trans. C. Emerson & M. Holquist, University of Texas Press, Austin, TX.
Bakhtin, M. (1984), Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. C. Emerson, University of Min-
nesota Press, Minneapolis, MN.
Banivanua-Mar, T. (2007), Violence and Colonial Dialogue: The Australian-Pacific Indenture Labor
Trade, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, HI.
Barrow, L. & Davies, R. (1947), “Political Activity on San Cristoval and Ulawa”, Assistant District
Commissioners to District Commissioner, 8 Feb., British Solomon Islands Protectorate
(Western Pacific Archives), BSIP 4/C91, Solomon Islands National Archives, Honiara.
Baugh, A. C. (1967), “The Middle English Period (1100– 1500)”, in A Literary History of England, vol.
1, A. C. Baugh (ed.), 2nd edn, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, pp. 109–312.
Bell, J. A. (2006), “Marijuana, guns, crocodiles and submarines: Economies of desire in the Purari
Delta”, Oceania, vol. 76, no. 3, pp. 220–234.
Bennett, A. (2005), The Author, Routledge, New York.
Bennett, J. (1987), Wealth of the Solomons: A History of a Pacific Archipelago, 1800–1978, University
of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, HI.
Bennett, J. (2002), “Roots of Conflict in Solomon Islands. Though Much is Taken, Much Abides:
Legacies of Tradition and Colonialism”, State, Society and Governance in Melanesia Project
Discussion Paper 2002/2005, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian
National University, Canberra.
Bennett, J. (2009), Natives and Exotics: World War II and Environment in the Southern Pacific,
University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, HI.
144 M. W. Scott
Berthelot, A. (2004), King Arthur: Chivalry and Legend, trans. Ruth Sharman, Thames and Hudson,
London.
Biersack, A. (1996), “Word made flesh: Religion, the economy, and the body in the Papua New
Guinea Highlands”, History of Religions, vol. 36, no. 2, pp. 85–111.
Bodel, J. (1989), La chanson des saisnes, vol. 1, A. Brasseur (ed.), Droz, Geneva.
Bodel, J. (1992), La chanson des Saxons, ed. and trans. A. Brasseur, Honoré Champion, Paris.
Boirayon, M. (2003a), “The dragon snake: A Solomon Islands UFO mystery”, Nexus, vol. 10, no. 5,
pp. 59–63.
Boirayon, M. (2003b), “Giant races still exist in the Solomon Islands”, Nexus, vol. 10, no. 5, pp. 65–67.
Boirayon, M. (2009), Solomon Islands Mysteries: Accounts of Giants and UFOs in the Solomon Islands,
Adventures Unlimited Press, Kempton, IL.
Bradford, F. J. (1861), “Letter to British Consul”, Tahiti, 7 Sept., British Consulate Papers, vol. 5, in-
letters, 1857–1866, set 24, item 8, Mitchell Library, Sydney [viewed microfilm no. S01356, reel
8, Hamilton Library, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, HI].
Braithwaite, J., Dinnen, S., Allen, M., Braithwaite, V. & Charlesworth, H. (2010), Pillars and Shadows:
Statebuilding as Peacebuilding in Solomon Islands, Australian National University E Press,
Canberra.
Brown, T. (2005), “Christian contextual theology—A Pacific example: Malaita’s ‘sabbath-keeping
Anglicans’ and the Hermeneutical circle”, Pacific Journal of Theology, series 2, no. 33,
pp. 5 –35.
Burridge, K. (1960), Mambu: A Study of Melanesian Cargo Movements and Their Ideological Back-
ground, Harper and Row, New York.
Burt, B. (1983), “The Remnant Church: A Christian sect of the Solomon Islands”, Oceania, vol. 53,
no. 4, pp. 334–346.
Burt, B. (1994), Tradition and Christianity: The Colonial Transformation of a Solomon Islands Society,
Harwood Academic Publishers, New York.
Clark, J. (1997), “Imagining the State, or Tribalism and the Arts of Memory in the Highlands of
Papua New Guinea”, in Narratives of Nation in the South Pacific, T. Otto & N. Thomas
(eds), Harwood Academic Publishers, Amsterdam, pp. 65–90.
Cochrane, D. G. (1970), Big Men and Cargo Cults, Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Coombe, F. (1911), Islands of Enchantment: Many-Sided Melanesia, MacMillan, London.
Corris, P. (1973), Passage, Port and Plantation: A History of Solomon Islands Labour Migration 1870–
1914, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne.
Cromar, J. (1935), Jock of the Islands: Early Days in the South Seas, Faber and Faber, London.
Curley, M. J. (1994), Geoffrey of Monmouth, Maxwell Macmillan, Oxford.
Dalton, D. (2000), “Introduction”, Oceania, vol. 70, no. 4, pp. 285–293.
Dalton, D. (2004), “Cargo and Cult: The Mimetic Critique of Capitalist Culture”, in Cargo, Cult and
Culture Critique, H. Jebens (ed.), University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, HI, pp. 187–208.
Davies, R. (1980), “The Marching Rule and the British Solomon Islands Government”, Pacific Manu-
scripts Bureau, PMB 1076.
Davies, R. (n.d.), “Marching Rule: A Personal Memoir”, Pacific Manuscripts Bureau, PMB 1076.
Davies, R. R. (1996), The Matter of Britain and the Matter of England. An Inaugural Lecture Delivered
Before the University of Oxford on 29 February 1996, Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Davies, R. R. (2000), The First English Empire: Power and Identities in the British Isles, 1093–1343,
Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Denholm-Young, N. (ed. and trans.) (1957), Vita Edwardi Secundi, Monachi Cuiusdam Malmesber-
iensis [The Life of Edward the Second, by the so-called Monk of Malmesbury], Thomas Nelson
and Sons, London.
Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. (2003), Solomon Islands: Rebuilding an Island Economy,
Department of Foreign Affairs, Barton, A.C.T., Australia.
Dickinson, J. H. C. (1927), A Trader in the Savage Solomons: A Record of Romance and Adventure,
H. F. and G. Witherby, London.
Dinnen, S. (2002), “Winners and losers: Politics and disorder in the Solomon Islands 2000– 2002”,
Journal of Pacific History, vol. 37, no. 3, pp. 285–298.
Dougherty, C. (1993), The Poetics of Colonization: From City to Text in Archaic Greece, Oxford Uni-
versity Press, Oxford.
Dumont, L. (1980), Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications, University of Chicago
Press, Chicago, IL.
Dumont d’Urville, J. S. C. (1843), Voyage au Pole Sud et dans L’Océanie, vol. 5, Histoire du Voyage,
Gide, Paris.
Dureau, C. (1998), “Decreed affinities: Nationhood and the Western Solomon Islands”, Journal of
Pacific History, vol. 33, no. 2, pp. 197–220.
Eves, R. (2003), “Money, mayhem and the beast: Narratives of the world’s end from New Ireland
(Papua New Guinea)”, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, vol. 9, no. 3, pp. 527–547.
Faletra, M. A. (2000), “Narrating the Matter of Britain: Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Norman
colonization of Wales”, Chaucer Review, vol. 35, no. 1, pp. 60–85.
Faletra, M. A. (trans. and ed.) (2008), The History of the Kings of Britain, by Geoffrey of Monmouth,
Broadview Editions, Plymouth, England.
Fifi‘i, J. (1989), From Pig-Theft to Parliament: My Life Between Two Worlds, trans. and ed. R. M.
Keesing, Institute of Pacific Studies, University of the South Pacific, Suva, Fiji.
Forster, M. (1943), Letter to Colonel Marchant, 8 March, British Solomon Islands Protectorate
(Western Pacific Archives), BSIP 5/I/F2/1/5, Solomon Islands National Archives, Honiara.
Fox, C. E. (1924), The Threshold of the Pacific: An Account of the Social Organization, Magic and Reli-
gion of the People of San Cristoval in the Solomon Islands, Kegan Paul, Trench, and Trubner,
London.
Fox, J. J. (1994), “Reflections on ‘hierarchy’ and ‘precedence’”, History and Anthropology, vol. 7,
nos. 1 –4, pp. 87–108.
Fox, J. J. (2008), “Installing the ‘outsider’ inside: The exploration of an epistemic Austronesian cul-
tural theme and its social significance”, Indonesia and the Malay World, vol. 36, no. 105, pp.
201–218.
Fraenkel, J. (2004), The Manipulation of Custom: From Uprising to Intervention in the Solomon
Islands, Pandanus Books, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National
University, Canberra.
Gegeo, D. W. (1998), “Indigenous knowledge and empowerment: Rural development examined from
within”, Contemporary Pacific, vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 289–315.
Gina, L. M. (2003), Journeys in a Small Canoe: The Life and Times of a Solomon Islander, J. A. Bennett
& K. J. Russell (eds) Pandanus Books, Canberra.
Goldstein, R. J. (1993), The Matter of Scotland: Historical Narrative in Medieval Scotland, University
of Nebraska Press, London.
Greenway, D. (ed. and trans.) (2002), Historia Anglorum [The History of the English People, 1000–
1154], by Henry of Huntington, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Guiart, J. (1951), “Forerunners of Melanesian nationalism”, Oceania, vol. 22, no. 2, pp. 81–90.
Guidieri, R. & Pellizzi, F. (1988), “Introduction: ‘Smoking Mirrors’—Modern Polity and Ethnicity”,
in Ethnicities and Nations: Processes of Interethnic Relations in Latin America, Southeast Asia,
and the Pacific, R. Guidieri, F. Pellizzi & S. J. Tambiah (eds), University of Texas Press,
Austin, TX, pp. 7–38.
Guo, P. (2006), “From currency to agency: Shell money in contemporary Langalanga, Solomon
Islands”, Asia-Pacific Forum [Ya Tai yan jiu lun tan], vol. 31, pp. 17 –38.
Guppy, H. B. (1887), The Solomon Islands and Their Natives, Swan Sonneschein and Lowrey, London.
Herlihy, J. M. (2003), “Marching Rule revisited: When the cargo comes”, New Pacific Review, vol. 2,
no. 1, pp. 185–205.
146 M. W. Scott
Hermann, E. (2004), “Dissolving the Self-Other Dichotomy in Western ‘Cargo Cult’ Constructions”,
in Cargo, Cult and Culture Critique, H. Jebens (ed.), University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, HI,
pp. 36–58.
Higham, N. J. (2002), King Arthur: Myth-Making and History, Routledge, London.
Hviding, E. (2003), “Disentangling the Butubutu of New Georgia: Cognatic Kinship in Thought
and Action”, in Oceanic Socialities and Cultural Forms: Ethnographies of Experience, I. Hoëm,
& S. Roalkvam (eds), Berghahn Books, Oxford, pp. 71–113.
Ingham, P. C. (2001), Sovereign Fantasies: Arthurian Romance and the Making of Britain, University of
Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, PA.
Iteanu, A. & Kapon, E. (2001), Letter to the Dead, 61 minutes, Felix Production, Paris.
Jebens, H. (2010), After the Cult: Perceptions of Other and Self in West New Britain (Papua New
Guinea), Berghahn Books, Oxford.
Kabutaulaka, T. T. (2001), “Beyond Ethnicity: The Political Economy of the Guadalcanal Crisis in
Solomon Islands”, State, Society and Governance in Melanesia Project Discussion Paper
01/1, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, Canberra.
Kabutaulaka, T. T. (2005), “Australian foreign policy and the RAMSI intervention in Solomon
Islands”, Contemporary Pacific, vol. 17, no. 2, pp. 283–308.

Kaima, S. T. (1991), “The evolution of cargo cults and the emergence of political parties in Melane-
sia”, Journal de la Société des Océanistes, no. 92 –93, pp. 173–180.
Keesing, R. M. (1971), “Descent, Residence and Cultural Codes”, in Anthropology in Oceania: Essays
Presented to Ian Hogbin, L. R. Hiatt & C. Jayawardena (eds), Angus and Robertson, Sydney,
pp. 121–138.
Keesing, R. M. (1978), “Politico-religious movements and anti-colonialism on Malaita: Maasina Rule
in historical perspective”, Oceania, vol. 48, no. 4, pp. 241–261, vol. 49, no. 1, pp. 46 –73.
Keesing, R. M. (1986), “Plantation networks, plantation culture: The hidden side of colonial Mela-
nesia”, Journal de la Société des Océanistes, no. 82 –83, pp. 163–170.
Keesing, R. M. (1992), Custom and Confrontation: The Kwaio Struggle for Cultural Autonomy, Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.
Keesing, R. M. (n.d.), “Racial and Ethnic Categories in Colonial and Postcolonial States: Sociological
and Linguistic Perspectives of Ideology”, UNESCO International Seminar on Theoretical
Issues of Race and Ethnicity, Milan, Italy, [Online] available at http://www.unesco.org/ulis/
cgi-bin/ulis.pl?catno=64193&set=4BEB67F9_3_171&gp=1&lin=1&ll=1
Keevil, D. (ed.) (1972), Custom Stories of the Solomon Islands, vol. 2, ‘Are‘are Folklore Stories, Solomon
Islands Museum Association, Honiara.
Kwa‘ioloa, M. & Burt, B. (2007), “‘The chiefs’ country’: A Malaitan view of the conflict in Solomon
Islands”, Oceania, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 111–127.
Laracy, H. M. (1976), Marists and Melanesians: A History of Catholic Missions in the Solomon Islands,
University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, HI.
Laracy, H. M. (1983), “Introduction”, in Pacific Protest: The Maasina Rule Movement, Solomon
Islands, 1944–1952, H. M. Laracy (ed.), University of the South Pacific, Suva, Fiji.
Lattas, A. (1998), Cultures of Secrecy: Reinventing Race in Bush Kaliai Cargo Cults, University of Wis-
consin Press, Madison, WI.
Lawrence, P. (1954), “Cargo cults and religious beliefs among the Garia”, International Archives of
Ethnography, vol. 47, pp. 1–20.
Lawrence, P. (1964), Road Belong Cargo: A Study of the Cargo Movement in the Southern Madang Dis-
trict, New Guinea, University of Manchester Press, Manchester.
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1976), Structural Anthropology, vol. 2, trans. M. Layton, University of Chicago Press,
Chicago, IL.
Lindstrom, L. (1993), Cargo Cult: Strange Stories of Desire from Melanesia and Beyond, University of
Hawaii Press, Honolulu, HI.
Lindstrom, L. & White, G. M. (1990), Island Encounters: Black and White Memories of the Pacific War,
Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC.
Loomis, R. S. (1941), “King Arthur and the antipodes”, Modern Philology, vol. 38, no. 3, pp. 289–304.
Loomis, R. S. (1959a), “The Oral Diffusion of the Arthurian Legend”, in Arthurian Literature in the
Middle Ages, R. S. Loomis (ed.), Clarendon Press, Oxford, pp. 52–63.
Loomis, R. S. (1959b), “The Legend of Arthur’s Survival”, in Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages,
R. S. Loomis (ed.), Clarendon Press, Oxford, pp. 64–71.
Loyn, H. R. (1988), The “Matter of Britain”: A Historian’s Perspective, the Creighton Trust Lecture 1988
Delivered Before the University of London on Monday 7 November 1988, King’s College,
London.
MacDonald-Milne, B. (n.d.), Spearhead: The Story of the Melanesian Brotherhood, Melanesian
Mission, Watford, England.
Maeliau, M. (2003), Trouble in Paradise, Aroma Ministries, [Honiara, Solomon Islands].
Maetala, R. (2008), “Matrilinieal [sic] Land Tenure Systems in Solomon Islands: The Cases of Gua-
dalcanal, Makira and Isabel Provinces”, in Land and Women: The Matrilineal Factor: The Cases
of the Marshall Islands, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu, E. Huffer (ed.), Pacific Islands Forum
Secretariat, Suva, Fiji.

Malory, T. (1971), The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, E. Vinaver (ed.), Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Maziola, S. (2010), “Another mystery on mystery island”, Solomon Times Online, 13 Sept., [Online]
available at http://www.solomontimes.com/letter.aspx?show=3472
McDougall, D. (2009), “Becoming sinless: Converting to Islam in the Christian Solomon Islands”,
American Anthropologist, vol. 111, no. 4, pp. 480–491.
McDowell, N. (1988), “A note on cargo cults and cultural constructions of change”, Pacific Studies,
vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 121–134.
Mead, S. M. (1973), “Folklore and place names in Santa Ana, Solomon Islands”, Oceania, vol. 43,
no. 3, pp. 215–237.
Montgomery, C. (2006), The Shark God: Encounters with Myth and Magic in the South Pacific, Fourth
Estate, London.
Moore, C. R. (2004), Happy Isles in Crisis: The Historical Causes for a Failing State in Solomon Islands,
1998–2004, Asia Pacific Press, Canberra.
Moore, C. R. (2007), “Helpem Fren: The Solomon Islands, 2003–2007”, Journal of Pacific History,
vol. 42, no. 2, pp. 141–164.
Moore, C. R. (2008), “Pacific view: The meaning of governance and politics in the Solomon Islands”,
Australian Journal of International Affairs, vol. 62, no. 3, pp. 386–407.
Mynors, R. A. B., Thomson, R. M. & Winterbottom, M. (ed. and trans.) (1998), Gesta Regum
Anglorum: The History of the English Kings, by William of Malmesbury, vol. 1, Clarendon
Press, Oxford.
Naitoro, J. (1993), The Politics of Development in ‘Are‘are, Malaita, Master’s Thesis, University of
Otago, New Zealand.
Ngwadili, G., Gegeo, D. & Watson-Gegeo, K. (1988), “Malaita Refuge, Guadalcanal Labour Corp”, in
The Big Death: Solomon Islanders Remember World War II, G. M. White, D. Gegeo, D. Akin &
K. Watson-Gegeo (eds), Institute of Pacific Studies, Suva, Fiji, pp. 197–215.
Osifelo, E. (2010), “Villagers confuse [sic] over mystery plane”, Solomon Star, 14 Sept., [Online]
available at http://www.solomonstarnews.com/news/national/7979-villagers-confuse-over-
mystery-plane
Pocock, J. G. A. (1975), “British history: A plea for a new subject”, Journal of Modern History, vol. 47,
no. 4, pp. 601–621.
Reeve, M. D. (ed.) (2007), The History of the Kings of Britain: An Edition of De gestis Britonum [His-
toria Regum Britanniae], by Geoffrey of Monmouth, Boydell Press, Woodbridge, England.
Robertson, K. (1998), “Geoffrey of Monmouth and the translation of insular historiography”,
Arthuriana, vol. 8, no. 4, pp. 42–57.
148 M. W. Scott
Sahlins, M. (1985), Islands of History, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.
Sahlins, M. (1992), in Anahulu: The Anthropology of History in the Kingdom of Hawaii vol. 1.
Historical Ethnography, P. V. Kirch & M. Sahlins (eds), University of Chicago Press,
Chicago, IL.
Sahlins, M. (2004), Apologies to Thucydides: Understanding History as Culture and Vice Versa, Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.
Scales, I. (2007), “The coup nobody noticed: The Solomon Islands Western State movement in 2000”,
Journal of Pacific History, vol. 42, no. 2, pp. 187–209.
Scott, M. W. (2007), The Severed Snake: Matrilineages, Making Place, and a Melanesian Christianity in
Southeast Solomon Islands, Carolina Academic Press, Durham, NC.
Scott, M. W. (2008), “Proto-People and Precedence: Encompassing Euroamericans Through
Narratives of ‘First Contact’ in Solomon Islands”, in Exchange and Sacrifice, P. J. Stewart &
A. Strathern (eds), Carolina Academic Press, Durham, NC, pp. 140–176.
Scott, M. W. (2011), “The Makiran Underground Army: Kastom Mysticism and Ontology Politics in
Southeast Solomon Islands”, in Made in Oceania: Social Movements, Cultural Heritage and the
State in the Pacific, E. Hviding & K. M. Rio (eds), Sean Kingston Publishing, Wantage,
pp. 195–222.
Scott, M. W. (forthcoming), “Collecting Makira: Kakamora Stones, Shrine Stones, and the Grounds
for Things in Arosi”, in The Things We Value: Culture and History in Solomon Islands, B. Burt &
L. Bolton (eds), Sean Kingston Publishing, Wantage.
Smith, A. D. (2003), Chosen Peoples: Sacred Sources of National Identity, Oxford University Press,
Oxford.
Sofield, T. H. B. (2006), “Solomon Islands: Unity in Diversity—The End of a Dream?”, in Australia’s
Arc of Instability: The Political and Cultural Dynamics of Regional Security, D. Rumley & V. L.
Forbes (eds), Springer, Dordrecht, pp. 171–197.
Solomon Times Online. (2010), “No plane crash, says police”, Solomon Times Online, 10 Sept.,
[Online] available at http://www.solomontimes.com/news.aspx?nwID=5532
Stauffer, A. P. (1956), United States Army in World War II, The Technical Services, The Quartermaster
Corps: Operations in the War Against Japan, Office of the Chief of Military History, Depart-
ment of the Army, Washington, DC.
Strohm, P. (1971), “Storie, Spelle, Geste, Romaunce, Tragedie: generic distinctions in the Middle
English Troy narratives”, Speculum, vol. 46, no. 2, pp. 348–359.
Tabani, M. (2005), Alors vint John Frum: Une tragédie cultuelle des Mers du Sud, 77 minutes, CREDO,
Marseille.
Timmer, J. (2008), “Kastom and Theocracy: A Reflection on Governance from the Uttermost Part of
the World”, in Politics and State Building in Solomon Islands, S. Dinnen & S. Firth (eds), Asia
Pacific Press, Australian National University, Canberra, pp. 194–212.
Tomlinson, M. (2009), In God’s Image: The Metaculture of Fijian Christianity, University of California
Press, Berkeley, CA.
White, G. M. (1978), Big Men and Church Men: Social Images in Santa Isabel, Solomon Islands, PhD
Thesis, University of California, San Diego, CA.
White, G. M. (2001), “Native and Nations: Identity Formation in Postcolonial Melanesia”, in Places
and Politics in an Age of Globalization, R. Prazniak & A. Dirlik (eds), Rowman and Littlefield
Publishers, Oxford, pp. 139–166.
White, G. M., Gegeo, D., Akin, D. & Watson-Gegeo, K. (1988), The Big Death: Solomon Islanders
Remember World War II, Institute of Pacific Studies, Suva, Fiji.
White, T. H. (1958), The Once and Future King, Collins, London.
Worsley, P. (1968), The Trumpet Shall Sound: A Study of “Cargo” Cults in Melanesia, 2nd edn,
Schocken, New York.

Colonialism Competition Makira PDF

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Colonialism Competition Makira PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

This article was downloaded by: [188.85.109.

History and Anthropology

The Matter of Makira: Colonialism,

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2012.649276

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

The Matter of Makira: Colonialism,

Keywords: Ethnogenesis; Gender; Colonialism; Geoffrey of Monmouth; Solomon Islands

ISSN 0275-7206 print/1477-2612 online/12/010115–34 # 2012 Taylor & Francis

Prologue: The History of a Melanesian Mystery

country in the name of self-defence. In 2003 the Australian government—having pre-

intention of assisting Islanders to develop and govern themselves.

Santa Isabel—and perhaps elsewhere—Maasina Rule included “speculation about the

The Makiran Underground as Matter-Making

There are but three matters known to every estate,

epics—but the prolific, unsorted, unreconciled, living prima materia—both written

The Matter of Britain

synthesis that furthermore subordinated the Saxons.

This feminine colonization of proto-Romans by marriage was coincident, it should

insula, a recurring phrase in Geoffrey’s narrative—where they successfully repel off-

The Matter of Makira

sioned as military in essence, this underground realm is also sometimes described

“No Island is an Island”

There is some controversy among historians of Britain and medievalists over

Norman. More importantly, it is anti-Saxon and thus anti-Anglo-Norman. Geoffrey

of oppression appears to be fostering the elaboration of a variety of longstanding

and journalistic representations and double-voiced by Solomon Islanders, such dis-

the Euro-American record—the quintessential Solomon Islander is a Malaitan. This

Conclusion: Matters as Aesthetic Politics

thoughts, and stories during these periods. I acknowledge the Wenner-Gren

Islands”, Contemporary Pacific, vol. 17, no. 2, pp. 283–308.

Secretariat, Suva, Fiji.

You might also like